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 data synchronization

Data synchronization is an important aspect of any application that deals with multiple execution threads. Different threads often need to access the same variables or memory regions. Writing to the same memory at the same time by two or more independent threads can result in data corruption. Even reading the variable at the same time when it is being updated by another thread is dangerous, since it can be only partially updated at the moment of the read.

To avoid these issues, concurrent threads can use so-called synchronization primitives, the API that makes access to the shared memory deterministic and predictable.

Similar to the case with thread support, the C++ language did not provide any synchronization primitives prior to the C++11 standard. Starting with C++11, a number of synchronization primitives were added into the C++ standard library...