alt Hacker NewsPractical Guide to Bare Metal C++
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> There are multiple articles of how C++ is superior to C, that everything you can do in C you can do in C++ with a lot of extras, and that it should be used even with bare metal development
An interesting perspective. Could turn it around as "everything you can do in C++ you can do in C with a lot less language complexity".
My personal experience with low-level embedded code is that C++ is rarely all that helpful, tends to bait you into abstractions that don't really help, brings additional linker/compiler/toolchain complexity and often needs significant extra work because you can't really leverage it without building C++ abstractions over provided C-apis/register definitions.
Would not generally recommend.
While tag dispatching used to be a widely used idiom in C++ development, it was a workaround for which nowadays there are much better alternatives with constexpr, and concepts.
This seems very well written, but has a lot of requirements/previous knowledge required by a reader. Are there similar resources that fill these gaps?
> Although there is an opinion that templates are dangerous because of executable code bloating, I think that templates are developer’s friends, but the one must know the dangers and know how to use templates effectively. But again, it requires time and effort to get to know how to do it right.
idk man, obviously I don't know much since I don't have my own online book, but templates would not be at the start of my list when selling C++ for bare-metal.
unit suffixes, namespaces, RAII, constexpr, OOP (interfaces mostly), and I like a lot of the STL in avoiding inscrutable "raw loops".
I like the idea of templates, but it feels like a different and specialized skillset. If you are considering C++ from C, why not ease into it?
>StaticQueue: LinearisedIterator
Using C++ iterator interface to fix the main problem of a standard ring buffer of non-contiguous regions is a cute idea, but I like to use a "bip buffer"[1] instead which actually always gives you real contiguous regions so you can pass the pointers to things like a dma engine.
[1] https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/lock-free-ring-buffer/
The tradeoff is that you have in the worse case only half the buffer available - the ring buffer essentially becomes a kind of double buffer where you periodically switch between writing/reading at the end or the beginning of the storage.
Why does the link go to the abstract classes heading, halfway down the page?
link has extra "#_abstract_classes" in it that it would be better without
just use Rust, and never look back.
I took a brief skim through so apologies if I missed that it was mentioned, but wanted to bring up the Embedded Template Library[0]. The (over)simplified concept is: it provides a statically-allocated subset (but large subset) of the C++ standard library for use in embedded systems. I used it recently in a C++ embedded project for statically-allocated container/list types, and for parsing strings, and the experience was nice.
[0]: https://www.etlcpp.com/