Monthly Archives: September 2013

Casting – what could possibly go wrong?

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

Type casting in C++ is a form of what is known in computer science as type punning – that is, circumventing the type system of a programming language.

C++ inherits its conversion and casting mechanism from C, but supplements it (although sensibly we should say, replaces it) with four, more explicit cast operations:

static_cast
reinterpret_cast
const_cast
dynamic_cast

In C and C++ – and particularly in embedded systems – casting is a necessary evil; so much so that many programmers just accept it […]

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

The Rule of the Big Five

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

The dynamic creation and destruction of objects was always one of the bugbears of C. It requires the programmer to manually control the allocation, initialisation and deallocation of memory for the object. Because many C programmers weren’t educated in the potential problems (or were just plain lazy or delinquent in their programming) C got a reputation in some quarters for being an unsafe, memory-leaking language.

C++ improved matters significantly with an idiom known as RAII/RRID; more generically referred to as resource […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

UK based One-day ARM User Conference (and it’s free!)

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

For those of you that are not on our company hit list, sorry I mean mailing list, then you may not have heard about next week’s ARM User Conference run by the good folks at Hitex UK.

The event is titled “ARM – Continually Raising the Standard” and is being held at Stoneleigh Park near Coventry on the 19th September 2013. This year there are two streams running to allow a wider choice of presentation.

The event is also preceded by a number of (paid) workshops on […]

Posted in ARM | Leave a comment