I work on real-time embedded systems every day. Of course, my definition of embedded system may be different than yours. But we make full use of the STL and exceptions and do not experience any unmanageable problems. We also make use of dynamic memory (at a very high rate; allocating lots of packets per second, … Read more
Notice that space-compatible (radiation-hardened, aeronautics compliant) computing devices are very expensive (including to launch in space, since their weight exceeds kilograms), and that a single space mission costs perhaps hundred million € or US$. Losing the mission because of software or computer concerns has generally a prohibitive cost so is unacceptable and justifies costly development … Read more
If you want an easy way to code parsers, or you are tight on space, you should hand-code a recursive descent parser; these are essentially LL(1) parsers. This is especially effective for languages which are as “simple” as Basic. (I did several of these back in the 70s!). The good news is these don’t contain … Read more
For a very resource constrained target such as 4KB of RAM, I’d test the waters with some samples before committing a lot of effort that can’t be easily ported back into a pure ANSI C implementation. The Embedded C++ working group did propose a standard subset of the language and a standard subset of the … Read more
An object marked as const volatile will not be permitted to be changed by the code (an error will be raised due to the const qualifier) – at least through that particular name/pointer. The volatile part of the qualifier means that the compiler cannot optimize or reorder access to the object. In an embedded system, … Read more
In situations where performance is of utmost importance, the C compiler will most likely not produce the fastest code compared to what you can do with hand tuned assembly language. I tend to take the path of least resistance – for small routines like this, I just write asm code and have a good idea … Read more
CRC works fine for detecting random errors in data that might occur, for example, from network interference, line noise, distortion, etc. CRC is computationally much less complex than MD5 or SHA1. Using a hash function like MD5 is probably overkill for random error detection. However, using CRC for any kind of security check would be … Read more
Most of what you’re talking about are embedded systems where C is a luxury that may not be available. The software often isn’t separate programs running under an OS like you’d have on a desktop or phone, especially if the chip the designers chose to use is described as a “microcontroller”. Most of the time … Read more
That depends on the exact “object-oriented” feature-set you want to have. If you need stuff like overloading and/or virtual methods, you probably need to include function pointers in structures: typedef struct { float (*computeArea)(const ShapeClass *shape); } ShapeClass; float shape_computeArea(const ShapeClass *shape) { return shape->computeArea(shape); } This would let you implement a class, by “inheriting” … Read more
Each row in /proc/$PID/maps describes a region of contiguous virtual memory in a process or thread. Each row has the following fields: address perms offset dev inode pathname 08048000-08056000 r-xp 00000000 03:0c 64593 /usr/sbin/gpm address – This is the starting and ending address of the region in the process’s address space permissions – This describes … Read more