I'm interested in any comparisons between GCC and the Green Hills C compiler with regard to memory footprint of the generated code, specifically on ARM platforms.
Are there any benchmarks or comparisons for these compilers? What is the experience?
I have not seen any benchmarks, but from my experience, the two compilers are very similar with respect to code size and the code generated.
Green Hills has lots of documentation and support if you want to reduce your memory foot print. With GCC, it gets lonely very fast once you’re off the beaten track. Green Hills also support compressed executable images that is great if you have limited flash memory, but plenty of RAM.
I have also used custom runtime and C libraries (this can save you some more space) with both compilers but you will need to do some digging to get information for GCC, but for the Green Hills compiler, you can get some of the stuff via a wizard that generates the build file.