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)

Detecting the endianness of the platform

Endianness defines the order in which bytes that represent large numerical values are stored in memory.

There are two types of endianness:

  • Big-endian: The most significant byte is stored first. A 32-bit value, 0x01020304is stored at the ptr address, as follows: 

    Offset in memory (byte) Value
    ptr 0x01
    ptr + 1 0x02
    ptr + 2 ox03
    ptr + 3 0x04

    Examples of big-endian architectures include AVR32 and Motorola 68000.
  • Little-endian: The least significant byte is stored first. A 32-bit value, 0x01020304, is stored at the ptr address, as follows:

    Offset in memory (byte) Value
    ptr 0x04
    ptr + 1 0x03
    ptr + 2 0x02
    ptr + 3 0x01

    The x86 architecture is little-endian.

Taking care of endianness is especially essential when exchanging data with other systems. If a developer sends a 32...