Monthly Archives: January 2016

Function Parameters and Arguments on 32-bit ARM

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

Function call basics

When teaching classes about embedded C  or embedded C++ programming, one of the topics we always address is “Where does the memory come from for function arguments?“

Take the following simple C function:

void test_function(int a, int b, int c, int d);

when we invoke the function, where are the function arguments stored?

int main(void)
{
  //…
  test_function(1,2,3,4);
  //…
}

Unsurprisingly, the most common answer after “I don’t know” is “the stack“; and of course if you were compiling for x86 this would […]

Posted in ARM, C/C++ Programming, Cortex | Tagged , , | 5 Comments