A toolchain is a term that is used to describe a set of programming tools that are used to create a software product, which is typically an application program. A simple software development toolchain usually comprises a text editor, compiler, and linker, and often these are packaged together with other tools, such as a debugger, as an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The ARM uVision5 IDE is very easy to use, but the constraints imposed on the free evaluation version and the relatively high cost of the licensed, professional version motivate many programmers to explore alternative, free, open source toolchains. Here is just a sample of the available alternatives:

Open source software is usually made available as source code and then released under a GNU General Public License. The GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee users the freedom to share and change all versions of a program, ensuring that it remains free software for all its users. Luckily, developers usually make precompiled versions of most software released under the GNU license available, often supporting the Windows, Linux, and Macintosh (OSX) operating systems.

However, installing and configuring an open source toolchain from a precompiled binary is not easy, so the aim of this chapter is to guide us through the process. We will illustrate the installation of the GNU ARM Eclipse toolchain on a Windows platform. We are choosing this route because the toolchain has recently migrated to GitHub and the installation guide has been revised.