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Category Archives: Testing
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
GitHub Codespaces and online development
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 our previous posting, we discussed using VSCode’s Dev Container extension to allow running workspaces directly within a Docker container.
In December 2020, I was granted early access to a new feature developed by GitHub called Codespaces. Codespaces offers an online VSCode development environment, enabling you to develop entirely in the cloud.
The great news is that Codespaces uses the same core process, and file structure, as Dev Containers; meaning once we have our .devcontainer folder setup (if you are unfamiliar with […]
Posted in Agile, C/C++ Programming, General, Industry Analysis, Testing
Tagged Codespaces, docker, GitHub, GoogleTest, Meson, VSCode
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VSCode, Dev Containers and Docker: moving software development forward
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
Long term readers of this blog will know our devotion to using container-based technology, especially Docker, to significantly improve software quality through repeatable builds.
In the Autumn/fall of 2020, Microsoft introduced a Visual Studio Code (VSCode) extension Remote – Containers. With one quick stroke, this extension allows you to open a VSCode project within a Docker container.
Getting started with Dev Containers and Docker
There are several different approaches to using Dev Containers. In this post, we shall cover three options:
Using an existing […]
Posted in Agile, C/C++ Programming, Testing
Tagged C++, devcontainer, docker, GoogleMock, GoogleTest, Meson, ninja, VSCode
1 Comment
TDD with Compiler Explorer
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
Compiler Explorer (CE) has been around for several years now. When it first appeared on the scene, it immediately became an invaluable tool. Its ability to show generated assembler from given source code across many different compilers and ISAs (Instruction Set Architectures) is “mind-blowing”. We use it extensively when teaching as it allows you to clarify the effect your code can have on both performance and memory usage.
However, rather than limiting itself to only showing generated assembler, recent developments include the […]
Posted in Agile, C/C++ Programming, Testing
Tagged C++, C++11, Catch2, Compiler Explorer, doctest, GoogleTest, Modern C++, Testing
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Celebrating 10 years – my top 10 blog articles
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.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)
- Practice makes perfect, part 3 – Idiomatic kata - February 27, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 2– foundation kata - February 13, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata - January 30, 2020
It’s difficult to believe we’ve been writing articles for 10 years. In that time I’ve written over 90 technical articles on C, C++ and embedded system design.
To celebrate I’ve picked my ‘Top 10’ articles, with a little background into why I enjoyed writing them so much, or the story behind them.
So, sit back, cue up “At the Sign of the Swinging Cymbal“* and enjoy.
(* This really dates
Posted in C/C++ Programming, Design Issues, Testing, UML
Tagged arrays, casting, forwarding, Modern C++. C++11. C++14, move semantics, priority, Testing, unit test
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Using a Raspberry Pi as a remote headless J-Link Server
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
Here at Feabhas we tend to favour using Segger J-Link’s as our ‘go-to’ solution for target flashing and debug, as they fall into that category of tools that just work.
As part of our ongoing work around Agile and CI (Continuous Integration), we’re always interested in addressing that challenging step of automating target based test in a cost-effective manner.
The Raspberry Pi (RPi) is a ubiquitous low-cost platform for numerous tasks. One useful tasks that it can be used for is as […]
Python 3 Type Hints
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
The expected end of support for Python 2.7 is 1st January 2020, at least according to Guido van Rossum’s blog post. Starting now, you should consider developing all new Python applications in Python 3, and migrating existing code to Python 3 as and when time and workload permit.
Moving to Python 3
If you are unaware of the changes introduced in Python 3 that broke backward compatibility with Python 2 then there is a good summary on this What’s New In Python […]
Posted in Python, Python3, Testing
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An Introduction to Docker for Embedded Developers – Part 5 Multi-Stage Builds
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
Following on from the previous post, where we spent time reducing the docker image size, in this post I’d like to cover a couple of useful practices to further improve our docker image:
Copying local files rather than pulling from the web
Simplifying builds using a multi-stage build
Copying in Local Files
So far, when installing the GCC-Arm compiler, we have pulled it from the web using wget. This technique can suffer from two issues:
Web links are notoriously fragile
https adds complexity to the packages […]
Code Quality – Cyclomatic Complexity
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 the standard ISO 26262-6:2011 [1] the term “complexity” appears a number of times, generally in the context of reducing or lowering said complexity.
There are many different ways of defining “complexity”, for example, Fred Brooks, in his 1986 landmark paper, “No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering” asserts that there are two types of complexity; Essential and Accidental. [2]
Rather than getting into esoteric discussion about design complexity, I’d like to focus on code complexity.
Over the years, I […]
Posted in Agile, C/C++ Programming, General, Testing
Tagged cyclomatic complexity, McCabe, Static Analysis
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Bugs do matter…(unsurprisingly)
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
Welcome to 2018! How did that happen?
Thank you to everyone who attended last week’s webinar on “Measuring Software Quality“, and thank you for the positive feedback, it really does help us shape our future webinars/blogs.
During the talk, I discussed a suggestion by Sally Globe, along the lines of “Bugs don’t matter”/”Perfect software is the enemy of rapid deployment” as long as you are “Not wrong long”, which came from an initial exchange on Twitter back last year:The caveat was this […]