RealView Development Suite (RVDS) is the successor to the ARM Developer Suite (ADS) and the latest release of RVDS is version 3.1. The code-generation tools which come as part of RVDS 3.1 are called the RealView Compilation Tools (RVCT). There have been many enhancements to ARM's code generation tools since ADS 1.2. The major changes in RVCT 3.1 include:

• Full support for all the latest ARM processors, including the ARM11 family and the Cortex family

• A NEON Vectorizing Compiler add-on for generating NEON vector instructions directly from C or C++ code using the --vectorize  command-line option

• A new C library called Micro-library (Microlib) is introduced which is highly optimized for small code size

• Full ISO C++ Support by way of the EDG (Edison Design Group) front-end including exceptions, namespaces, templates and intelligent implementation of Run-Time Type Information (RTTI)

• Improved code size and performance of compiled code

• New optimization switch -O3 for even better code performance

• Compliant with the ARM ABI that allows for interoperation of binary objects from different toolchains such as GCC

• Improved support for BPABI executable and Dynamically Linked Library (DLL) generation, with the --bpabi and --dll command-line options

• ARM and Thumb compilation per-function (using "#pragma arm" and "#pragma thumb")

• Five floating-point models (selected with "--fpmode")

• New Embedded Assembler and re-engineered Inline Assembler

• New compiler intrinsics can replace some inline assembler

• Scatter file improvements including the --predefine="string" command-line option to allow commands to be passed to the pre-processor specified on the first line of the scatter file.

• Support for building Linux applications (see Application Note 178)

• No compatibility with legacy libraries built with ADS (RVDS 3.0 was the last toolkit to support this)

• Support for many GNU extensions, with the --gnu option

• Full C99 language support except for complex numbers and wide I/O using the command-line option --c99

• Unicode and Wide-character support in wchar.h

• DWARF3 debug tables support by default

• "Multi-file compilation" for optimisation across several related C files

• New "Unified Assembler Language" (UAL) simplifies migration from ARM & Thumb to Thumb-2

• RW data compression and Linker feedback to further reduce ROM size

• Eclipse is the preferred IDE for building projects and CodeWarrior IDE is no longer part of the standard toolkit, although it is available as an optional chargeable add-on.

• Chinese, Japanese and Korean language support for displaying error and warning messages with the --message_locale option.

• RVDS 3.1 : RVCT 3.1 NEON Vectorizing Compiler Guide
• What is Microlib?
• Application Binary Interface (ABI) for the ARM Architecture
• App Note 178: Building Linux Applications Using RVDS 3.1
• ARM Workbench IDE for RealView Development Suite
• Neon Support in the RealView Compiler