Tag Archives: Templates

A brief introduction to Concepts – Part 2

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 part 1 of this article we looked at adding requirements to parameters in template code to improve the diagnostic ability of the compiler.  (I’d recommend reading this article first, if you haven’t already)

Previously, we looked at a simple example of adding a small number of requirements on a template parameter to introduce the syntax and semantics.  In reality, the constraints imposed on a template parameter could consist of any combination of

Type traits
Required type aliases
Required member attributes
Required member functions

Explicitly listing […]

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A brief introduction to Concepts – Part 1

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

Templates are an extremely powerful – and terrifying – element of C++ programs.  I say “terrifying” – not because templates are particularly hard to use (normally), or even particularly complex to write (normally) – but because when things go wrong the compiler’s output is a tsunami of techno-word-salad that can overwhelm even the experienced programmer.

The problem with generic code is that it isn’t completely generic.  That is, generic code cannot be expected to work on every possible type we could […]

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Making things do stuff – Part 9

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

As a final instalment in this series on hardware manipulation I thought I’d revisit read-only and write-only register types.

Using tag dispatch is not the only way to solve the read- or write-only Register problem.  For completeness let’s explore two other alternatives – SFINAE and constexpr if.

For these examples I’m going to use a simplified version of our Register class.  I’m ignoring the bit proxy class and using a reduced API.  Once understood, the techniques below can be applied to these […]

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Making things do stuff – Part 8

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

We’ve been using templates to provide a hardware register abstraction for use with hardware manipulation problems, typical of what you’d find in a deeply-embedded (“bare-metal”) system.

Previously, we looked at using trait classes to establish pointers and tag-dispatch to handle special-case registers, such as read-only or write-only register.

In this article we’re going to add some syntactic sugar to our Register class, to allow the developer to access individual bits in the register using array-index ([]) notation.  This will allow us to […]

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Making things do stuff – Part 7

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 our previous article we explored using templates to build a generic ‘register’ type to allow programmers to access hardware without all the nasty syntax of integer-to-pointer casting, etc.

At the moment, this class gives us little extra functionality beyond cleaning up the syntax (although, in its favour, it also doesn’t incur any additional run-time cost/performance).

In this article we’re going to extend our design to consider special hardware register types – notably read-only and write-only registers – and see how we can […]

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Making things do stuff – Part 6

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

As code designers we tend to eschew specific ‘stove-pipe’ code in favour of reusable code elements.  Up until now we’ve been coding some very specific examples so it’s probably worth looking at some more generic solutions.

In this article we’ll look at building generic register manipulation classes (or, as one commenter referred to them, ‘register proxy’ classes).  Here, we’re really exploring code design rather than coding ‘mechanics’.  I’m using this to explore some factors like the balance between efficiency, performance and […]

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Traits classes

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

Introduction

In this final article we’ll have a look at the issue of communicating template type information between different template instantiations, and have a look at the Traits mechanism as a method of solving these

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Template specialisation

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

Introduction

Welcome back to the wonderful world of templates.

So far, we have looked at what are known as base templates. In this article we’re going to look at one of the more confusing aspects of templates – specialisation. The choice of the word specialisation is unfortunate, as many confuse it with inheritance and sub-typing; in this case specialised means “more

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Templates of templates

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

Introduction

In this brief article we’ll have a look at the topic of building template classes whose parameters are themselves templates.

I’m assuming you’re reasonably familiar with template classes.  If not, here’s a quick

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Variadic templates

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

Introduction

In this article we’re going to look at a new feature of templates in C++11 – the concept of the variadic template.

Variadic templates allow us to create functions and classes, not only with generic types, but also a variable number of generic

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