Monthly Archives: June 2013

Debunking priority

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Glennan Carnie

Before I start, a disclaimer:

For the purposes of this article I’m limiting the discussion to even-driven systems on priority-based, pre-emptive operating systems, on single processors.

I’m using the word task to mean ‘unit of execution’ or ‘unit of schedulability’, in preference to thread or process. I’m ignoring the different OS memory models.

There seems to be a fair amount of misunderstanding about the concept of priority in concurrent programming:

Priority means one task is more ’important’ than another.
Priority allows one task to […]

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Style vs. Substance in C programming

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

In an email from UBM Tech this week there was a link to an article titled “A Simple Style for C Programming by Mansi Research“. It was actually authored back on May 2010 by Meetul Kinariwala but appeared this week under the what’s hot section, so I thought I’d take a look [advice to the reader; don’t bother].

The problem with guides like this is that style is a very subjective area (as any parent will tell you how their kids […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming, Design Issues, General | Tagged , , | 7 Comments