https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14905132
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For ARM Cortex devices you have quite a lot of options available (; If you're in a mood for a bit of automatic translation you could check my website - I wrote a tutorial about (open source) toolchain for ARM - http://www.freddiechopin.info/pl/artykuly/35-arm/59-arm-toolchain-tutorial - unfortunately it's not translated to English, so you'll have to use google translate. There are also some other resources that you might find useful, especially my template/example projects for such toolchain (in Download). If you ever used Eclipse, Makefile and GCC this whole subject should be easy for you. Most of example projects will be close to what you need, but you should probably check example for STM32 (any) - which is a Cortex-M3, and the example for LPC1114 - which is a Cortex-M0.
As for the simulator, I personally think they're not worth the trouble, recent GCC toolchains disable it anyway, as it's only instruction simulator, you won't be able to easily simulate peripherals. If you want to simulate instructions just write your code for PC as it will work the same way (; If you need to check something on the real hardware you can use GDB and JTAG. As long as it's not some extremely expensive proprietary design (you can - again - check my website for other options) the tools are almost free - OpenOCD (GDB Server) is open-source, and you can buy a FTx232 based JTAG (the most popular kind for OpenOCD) starting at ~30$.
Big commercial toolchains sometimes have simulators with peripherals simulation, but these cost a few thousand € / year (;
Google around for "ARM Cortex" with keywords like: toolchain, gcc, openocd, debugging, jtag etc. to find some articles - there's a lot of it in the network.
Your question is really general, so pretty hard to answer, as we don't know what tools are you going to use, are you planing to use some external libraries, what type of work are you going to do with these devices etc.
From my experience contact with embedded world is often a huge shock for developers of PC software. It mostly works the same, but because resources are constrained you really should do things differently. You don't have "+infinity" of RAM, you should usually try to fit a lot of things in ROM and so on. And of course there's only C and C++, but in C++ you shouldn't use some of it's features (exceptions, RTTI, iostreams, parts of STL, ...), dynamic allocation of memory is not a good idea generally (with the chip you mentioned - 4kB of RAM - it's out of question in my opinion).
The chip you mentioned is really tiny, so it will probably be a bigger shock (;
Try to ask some specific question and give some more details about your project so we could give more detailed answers (;
