Hello everyone!
As usual, I’m providing a short summary to the previously held San Diego C++ Meetup session.
But before this, I’d like to promote the next, upcoming one – we are hosting Šimon Tóth that will present his talk – “Patterns of interview solutions“. This will happen on Tuesday, November 14th, 930am Pacific time. Looking forward!
The recording of the October meetup, named “Let’s embed it with C++” can be found here:
Here, you can find the past event Link on the meetup.com page.
The original meetup session was scheduled to October 10th but I had an emergency travel to Israel supporting my family as I lost my nephew during the first few hours of October 7th war.
So what did we discussed about during this 1:30 hrs of this session?
The idea was to provide an overview, mostly for beginners to intermediate levels on how can we use Modern C++ features in Embedded environment. The talk was heavily inspired by this excellent book By Christopher Kormanyos:
I also started by mentioning 2 great talks. One from Dan Saks, cppcon2016 – extern c: Talking to C programmers about C++, and the second one from cppcon2022 – Erik Rainey, “Using C++14 in an Embedded ‘SuperLoop’ Firmware”.
High level topics discussed:
- Using class types for encapsulations, organization of code, as well as namespaces
- (No)Overhead demonstrated using various features like class types, constexpr, using templates to improve code generation.
- Showing various code/options side by side using Compiler Explorer and the new CLion feature to “Show assembly” (what a great feature JetBrains!).
- Discussing the subset of C++ that is useful for embedded. The various trade-offs using STL(Standard Template Library).
- Using integral macros from “cstdint”. Thinking about portability of your code working with various OS and compiler vendors.
- static_asserts, limits for more compile time evaluation.
- Using std::array as a replacement to the C array.
- Why STL algorithms are a good fit for your programs? How do they compare to raw loops, runtime speed and generated code.
- The advantage of using User Defined string literals (one of my favorite features of the language!). How does it contribute to strongly typed elements with zero cost abstraction!
- C++ Core guidelines, using std::span<> (and gsl:: library if you are working on <20 standard).
- Demonstrating template integer sequences with Modern C++.
Conclusion is that C++ is more than suitable for embedded. You need to know how to use the language correctly, take advantage of templates when applicable, know STL well to avoid pitfalls!
That’s it for now. Hope this session is useful for various people at least as a good introductory session to various Modern C++ features.
Until next time, stay safe,
Kobi