In July 2025, we conducted a survey to know a bit more about your development habits when it comes to RISC-V. Thank you to all those who answered. Here is a small review of the results.
26 (resp. 21) people answered the first (resp. second) question so the sample size is really really small and the survey’s result should not be considered as representative of the RISC-V community. The sample size is too small and the survey method is far from perfect. Thanks a lot to all those answered. We found the answers quite interesting. We will certainly perform new surveys in the future.
How do you run program on RISC-V ?
Let’s first look at the first question, the results represent the percentage of response per category (a single choice was possible):
Spike (riscv-isa-sim) is the clear winner with 38% of respondents listing it as their first tool for RISC-V development, before hardware.
Hardware accounts for a little over a quarter of responses and “other” for a little under a quarter. This is surprisingly (to us) high, and could account for a few of you using FPGA or other tools (SAIL ?) for your RISC-V development.
QEMU arrives last at 12%1. Overall simulation accounts for at least 50% of your main RISC-V development tool. I believe this is an hint as the very recent availability of RISC-V hardware and the fact that a lot of people (maybe in our audience in particular) are developing on RISC-V ahead of hardware availability. We expect this to change/decrease over the years (I would suspect a very small majority of people use a simulator or an emulator to develop on x86).
How do you get from source to binary ?
The second question what about which compiler do you use for RISC-V. Here are the results:
GCC is the clear winner, with a majority of people (57%) using it for their RISC-V development, llvm comes second with (38%) and we have a lone rider who answered “other”, I am wondering which tool they are using and would love to know more (maybe they have their own compiler or write byte code by hand !). The underlying piece of information is that the standard open source compiler toolchain are mature enough that people can use them for RISC-V development. Both main compiler suites offer RISC-V support and are “widely” used by the RISC-V community.
I wondering if people are using GCC more than clang because it is the default compiler in riscv-collab/riscv-gnu-toolchain or if there is a different reasons (llvm is also available in that toolchain).
Conclusion
The “average” RISC-V developer (at least the one who answered this survey) uses gcc to build a program that he will run using a simulator/emulator (generally the spike ISS). Hopefully, this will transition to more and more hardware being used.
If you want to tell us more about how you develop on RISC-V and which tools you use, feel free to leave a comment describing your setup.