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)

Avoiding exceptions for error handling

A mechanism of exceptions is an integral part of the C++ standard. It is a recommended way to design error handling in C++ programs. It does, however, have limitations that do not always make it acceptable for real-time systems, especially safety-critical ones. 

C++ exception handling depends heavily on stack unwinding. Once an exception is thrown, it propagates by the call stack up to the catch block that can handle it. This means that destructors of all local objects in all stack frames in its path are invoked, and it is hard to determine and formally prove the worst-case time of this process.

That is why coding guidelines for safety-critical systems, such as MISRA or JSF, explicitly forbid the use of exceptions for error handling. 

This does not mean that C++ developers have to revert to the traditional plain C error codes...