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Category Archives: C/C++ Programming
Using final in C++ to improve performance
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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
- Using final in C++ to improve performance - November 14, 2022
- Understanding Arm Cortex-M Intel-Hex (ihex) files - October 12, 2022
Dynamic polymorphism (virtual functions) is central to Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Used well, it provides hooks into an existing codebase where new functionality and behaviour can (relatively) easily be integrated into a proven, tested codebase.
Subtype inheritance can bring significant benefits, including easier integration, reduced regression test time and improved maintenance.
However, using virtual functions in C++ brings a runtime performance overhead. This overhead may appear inconsequential for individual calls, but in a non-trivial real-time embedded application, these overheads may build up and […]
Posted in C/C++ Programming, Design Issues
Tagged C++, design patterns, final, interface, Modern C++, Polymorphism
12 Comments
Understanding Arm Cortex-M Intel-Hex (ihex) files
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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
- Using final in C++ to improve performance - November 14, 2022
- Understanding Arm Cortex-M Intel-Hex (ihex) files - October 12, 2022
Creating a flash image
The primary purpose of the ihex file in the embedded space is to create a file that is used to program/reprogram a target system. There are various file formats around, with the Intel Hex (ihex) format being among the most widely used.
The output of the linker stage of a build process is typically to generate a .elf file (Executable and Linkable Format). Many debuggers and programmers can work directly with the ELF file format. However, in many […]
Working with Strings in Embedded C++
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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
- Using final in C++ to improve performance - November 14, 2022
- Understanding Arm Cortex-M Intel-Hex (ihex) files - October 12, 2022
In this post, by Embedded I’m generally referring to deeply embedded/bare-metal systems as opposed to Linux-based embedded systems.
Embedded systems and strings
Historically, the need for and thus the use of strings in embedded systems was fairly limited. However, this has changed with the advent of cheaper, full graphic displays and the growth of the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT).
Many embedded systems sport full-colour graphics displays, supported by embedded-specific graphics libraries, including:
free open-source – e.g. LVGL
vendor-specific – e.g. TouchGFX from STMicroelectronics
fully specialised graphics […]
TDD in C with Ceedling and WSL2 – performance issues
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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
- Using final in C++ to improve performance - November 14, 2022
- Understanding Arm Cortex-M Intel-Hex (ihex) files - October 12, 2022
Ceedling is still probably the best Test-Driven Development (TDD) environment for C programmers out there. But, as with many Free Open-Source Software ( FOSS ), tools getting it to work natively on a Windows environment involves the odd hoop-jumping exercise; either involving messing around with the likes of Cygwin or Mingw; or using a full Virtual Machine (VM) environment such as VirtualBox or VMware.
However, with the introduction of Windows-Subsystem-for-Linux (WSL) and the much-improved update to WSL2, running Linux centric FOSS […]
Posted in Build-systems, C/C++ Programming, Linux, Testing
Tagged C Declarations, C++, ceedling, TDD, Testing, WSL2
3 Comments
C++20 Coroutine Iterators
Associate Instructor at Feabhas Ltd
An independent IT trainer Martin has over 40 years academic and commercial experience in open systems software engineering. He has worked with a range of technologies from real time process controllers, through compilers, to large scale parallel processing systems; and across multiple sectors including industrial systems, semi-conductor manufacturing, telecomms, banking, MoD, and government.
Latest posts by Martin Bond (see all)
- C++20 Coroutine Iterators - September 23, 2021
- C++20 Coroutines - September 16, 2021
- CMake Part 4 – Windows 10 Host - September 2, 2021
In my first blog post about C++20 Coroutines I introduced the concepts behind a synchronous or generator style coroutine and developed a template class to support coroutines for any data type.
In this post I’ll add an iterator to the template to support the range-for loop and iterative algorithms. You may want to review that post before reading this one but the following code should act as a reminder about how to write and use a coroutine to read two floating […]
C++20 Coroutines
Associate Instructor at Feabhas Ltd
An independent IT trainer Martin has over 40 years academic and commercial experience in open systems software engineering. He has worked with a range of technologies from real time process controllers, through compilers, to large scale parallel processing systems; and across multiple sectors including industrial systems, semi-conductor manufacturing, telecomms, banking, MoD, and government.
Latest posts by Martin Bond (see all)
- C++20 Coroutine Iterators - September 23, 2021
- C++20 Coroutines - September 16, 2021
- CMake Part 4 – Windows 10 Host - September 2, 2021
C++20 Coroutines
There seems to be a lot of confusion around the implementation of C++20 coroutines, which I think is due to the draft technical specification for C++20 stating that coroutines are a work in progress so we can’t expect full compiler and library support at this point in time.
A lot of the problems probably arise from the lack of official documentation about working with coroutines. We have been given C++ syntax support for coroutines (the co_yield and co_return) but without […]
CMake Part 4 – Windows 10 Host
Associate Instructor at Feabhas Ltd
An independent IT trainer Martin has over 40 years academic and commercial experience in open systems software engineering. He has worked with a range of technologies from real time process controllers, through compilers, to large scale parallel processing systems; and across multiple sectors including industrial systems, semi-conductor manufacturing, telecomms, banking, MoD, and government.
Latest posts by Martin Bond (see all)
- C++20 Coroutine Iterators - September 23, 2021
- C++20 Coroutines - September 16, 2021
- CMake Part 4 – Windows 10 Host - September 2, 2021
In previous blog posts in this series (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3), I looked at using CMake on a Linux host to configure a build to cross compile to target hardware such as the STM32F4 Series. In this post, we’ll work with the GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain on a Windows 10 Host.
The first part of this blog discusses running the Windows hosted versions of CMake, GNU Arm Embedded Toolchain and GNU Make. An alternative approach, briefly discussed at […]
Posted in ARM, Build-systems, C/C++ Programming, CMSIS, Cortex, Toolchain
Tagged CMake, Cross Compiler, Windows 10
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C++20 modules with GCC11
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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Disassembling a Cortex-M raw binary file with Ghidra - December 20, 2022
- Using final in C++ to improve performance - November 14, 2022
- Understanding Arm Cortex-M Intel-Hex (ihex) files - October 12, 2022
Introduction
One of the headline changes of the C++20 standard is the inclusion of modules. Modules promise to significantly change the structure of C++ codebases and possibly signal headers’ ultimate demise (but probably not in my lifetime). It also opens the door to potentially have a unified build system and package manager, similar to Rust’s Cargo package manager; though I imaging standardising a unified build system would be one bloody battle.
Pre-C++20 builds
If you want to start a heated debate on any […]
CMake Part 3 – Source File Organisation
Associate Instructor at Feabhas Ltd
An independent IT trainer Martin has over 40 years academic and commercial experience in open systems software engineering. He has worked with a range of technologies from real time process controllers, through compilers, to large scale parallel processing systems; and across multiple sectors including industrial systems, semi-conductor manufacturing, telecomms, banking, MoD, and government.
Latest posts by Martin Bond (see all)
- C++20 Coroutine Iterators - September 23, 2021
- C++20 Coroutines - September 16, 2021
- CMake Part 4 – Windows 10 Host - September 2, 2021
In previous blog posts in this series (Part 1 and Part 2), I looked at using CMake to configure a build for a cross compilation to target hardware such as the STM32F4 Series. In this blog post I will look at how to configure project source code, identify subsystems and use CMake to manage the build for each subsystem.
In our training courses, we have identified two shared subsystems: the bare metal code used to initialise the C/C++ run time system […]
Posted in ARM, Build-systems, C/C++ Programming, CMSIS, Cortex, Toolchain
Tagged CMake, Cross Compiler
3 Comments
CMake Part 2 – Release and Debug builds
Associate Instructor at Feabhas Ltd
An independent IT trainer Martin has over 40 years academic and commercial experience in open systems software engineering. He has worked with a range of technologies from real time process controllers, through compilers, to large scale parallel processing systems; and across multiple sectors including industrial systems, semi-conductor manufacturing, telecomms, banking, MoD, and government.
Latest posts by Martin Bond (see all)
- C++20 Coroutine Iterators - September 23, 2021
- C++20 Coroutines - September 16, 2021
- CMake Part 4 – Windows 10 Host - September 2, 2021
In my previous blog post CMake Part – The Dark Arts I discussed how to configure CMake to cross-compile to target hardware such as our STM32F407 Discovery board.
We looked at the minimum requirements to configure the CMake build generator for a cross-compilation project using a project definition file (CMakeLists.txt), a toolchain definition file (toolchain-STM32F407.cmake). The CMake commands used to generate and build the project are:
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=toolchain-STM32F407.cmake
cmake –build build
In the real world, projects are never as simple […]
Posted in ARM, Build-systems, C/C++ Programming, Cortex, General, Toolchain
Tagged CMake, Cross Compiler
10 Comments