Book Image

Embedded Programming with Modern C++ Cookbook

By : Igor Viarheichyk
Book Image

Embedded Programming with Modern C++ Cookbook

By: Igor Viarheichyk

Overview of this book

Developing applications for embedded systems may seem like a daunting task as developers face challenges related to limited memory, high power consumption, and maintaining real-time responses. This book is a collection of practical examples to explain how to develop applications for embedded boards and overcome the challenges that you may encounter while developing. The book will start with an introduction to embedded systems and how to set up the development environment. By teaching you to build your first embedded application, the book will help you progress from the basics to more complex concepts, such as debugging, logging, and profiling. Moving ahead, you will learn how to use specialized memory and custom allocators. From here, you will delve into recipes that will teach you how to work with the C++ memory model, atomic variables, and synchronization. The book will then take you through recipes on inter-process communication, data serialization, and timers. Finally, you will cover topics such as error handling and guidelines for real-time systems and safety-critical systems. By the end of this book, you will have become proficient in building robust and secure embedded applications with C++.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Using statically allocated memory

As has already been discussed in Chapter 6, Memory Management, dynamic memory allocation should be avoided in real-time systems because generic memory allocators are not time-bound. While, in most cases, memory allocation does not take much time, it is not guaranteed. It is not acceptable for real-time systems.

The most straightforward way to avoid dynamic memory allocation is to replace it with static allocation. C++ developers often use std::vector to store sequences of elements. On account of its similarity with C arrays, it is efficient and easy to use and its interface is consistent with other containers in the standard library. Since vectors have a variable number of elements, they use dynamic memory allocation extensively. In many situations, however, the std::array class can be used instead of std::vector. It has the same interface...