Monthly Archives: June 2012

The C build process

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

In this article we look at the C build process – that is, how we get from C source files to executable code, programmed on the target.  It wasn’t so long ago this was common knowledge (the halcyon days of the hand-crafted make file!) but modern IDEs are making this knowledge ever-more arcane.

Compilation

The first stage of the build process is compilation.

The compiler is responsible for allocating memory for definitions (static and automatic) and generating opcodes from program statements. A relocatable […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 20 Comments

Can existing embedded applications benefit from Multicore Technology?

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

It feels that not a day goes by without a new announcement regarding a major development in multicore technology. With so much press surrounding multicore, you have to ask the question “Is it for me?” i.e. can I utilise multicore technology in my embedded application?

However, from a software developer’s perspective, all the code examples seem to demonstrate the (same) massive performance improvements to “rendering fractals” or “ray tracing programs”. The examples always refer to Amdahl’s Law, showing […]

Posted in ARM, Cortex, Design Issues, General, Industry Analysis | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Adapter pattern memory models

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

Following on from the article on Adapter patterns (Read more here) I’ve decided to explore the memory models of each of these patterns.

We’ll start with the simple case of a UtilityProvider class being a simple class with no virtual methods. Then we’ll look at what happens when the UtilityProvider has virtual functions added.

To flesh out the memory models I’ve added (arbitrary) data to both the UtilityProvider class and its adapters.

These memory models are based on the IAR Embedded Workbench C++ […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment