ARM today released the ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5) Community Edition (CE) - a free-to-use edition of the company's reference software development toolkit dedicated to the Android application developer community.

ARM claims that the toolkit helps developers create native software for compute intensive tasks that can run up to 4 times faster than Java code. DS-5 CE complements the standard SDK and NDK Android development kits by offering developers a set of tools to help them achieve the performance and energy-efficiency advantages made possible when ARM native code is used in Android applications.

DS-5 Community Edition includes limited, but essential functionality from the premium DS-5 toolkit to help solve common Android application developer pain points. It achieves this by providing an integrated graphical debugger for NDK-generated code and visibility of advanced processor information, including ARM NEON Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) registers. The new toolkit permits development of Java and C/C++ code in the same Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) to maximise productivity and ease of use.

DS-5 Community Edition features a tailored version of the ARM Streamline Performance Analyzer for use with compatible Android development platforms. Streamline captures detailed, system-wide performance statistics from a variety of sources which helps developers to locate hotspots in their code and isolate potential causes. Platform builders can add support for Streamline by integrating an open source driver available from the Linaro website.