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)

Exploring fixed-width integer types

C and C++ developers often forget that the size of fundamental data types such as char, short, and int are architecture-dependent. At the same time, most of the hardware peripherals define specific requirements regarding the size of the fields that are used for data exchanges. To make the code working with the external hardware or communication protocols portable, embedded developers use fixed-size integer types, which explicitly specify the size of a data field.

Some of the most commonly used data types are as follows:

Width Signed Unsigned
8-bit int8_t uint8_t
16-bit int16_t uint16_t
32-bit int32_t uint32_t

 

The pointer size also depends on the architecture. Developers often need to address the elements of arrays, and since arrays are internally represented as pointers, the offset representation depends on the pointer...