Book Image

Hands-On Embedded Programming with C++17

By : Maya Posch
5 (1)
Book Image

Hands-On Embedded Programming with C++17

5 (1)
By: Maya Posch

Overview of this book

C++ is a great choice for embedded development, most notably, because it does not add any bloat, extends maintainability, and offers many advantages over different programming languages. Hands-On Embedded Programming with C++17 will show you how C++ can be used to build robust and concurrent systems that leverage the available hardware resources. Starting with a primer on embedded programming and the latest features of C++17, the book takes you through various facets of good programming. You’ll learn how to use the concurrency, memory management, and functional programming features of C++ to build embedded systems. You will understand how to integrate your systems with external peripherals and efficient ways of working with drivers. This book will also guide you in testing and optimizing code for better performance and implementing useful design patterns. As an additional benefit, you will see how to work with Qt, the popular GUI library used for building embedded systems. By the end of the book, you will have gained the confidence to use C++ for embedded programming.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Using cross-compilers


Every compiler toolchain consists of a side (frontend) that takes in the source code and a side that outputs the binary format for the target platform (backend). There's no reason why the backend couldn't work on any other platform than the one it's targeting. In the end, one merely transforms text files into sequences of bytes.

Cross-compiling in this fashion is an essential feature with MCU-oriented development, as compiling directly on those MCUs would be highly inefficient. There is, however, nothing magical about this process. In the case of GCC-based and GCC-compatible toolchains, one would still be interacting with the same interfaces on the toolchain, just with the tools usually prefixed with the target platform name to distinguish them from other toolchains for different targets. Essentially, instead of g++ one would use arm-none-eabi-g++

The resulting binaries would be in the format appropriate for that target platform.