some topics for discussion

some topics for discussion

[Brendan Kehoe]

Hi!  I've been meaning to send this msg, to try to get conversation going on
some of the items that prompted the creation of this list.

It'd be really interesting to hear people's thoughts on:

  * what are the primary reasons that many embedded developers tend not to use 
    C++ for their applications or other programs?

  * which particular language features are commonly problematic for an
    embedded system?  e.g., the implementation of templates in some compilers
    can make code size difficult to accept, particularly for a system with a
    limited memory footprint.

  * if there are ways that exception handling can be used without too much
    runtime cost?

  * which tasks or bodies of code are very, very commonly implemented often
    for an embedded application, that might prove suitable to be part of a
    common C++ library to do the same?  (With abstraction as necessary.)

  * if there are optimizations that could be applied (but aren't yet, or are
    only in a limited sense) to compensate for the needs of an RTOS or
    similar environment?

B

--
Brendan Kehoe                                               brendan@cygnus.com
Cygnus Solutions, Sunnyvale, CA                                +1 408 542 9600

Web page: http://www.zen.org/~brendan/

Re: some topics for discussion

[Todd Hoff]

Brendan Kehoe wrote:
>   * what are the primary reasons that many embedded developers tend not to use
>     C++ for their applications or other programs?

It's in large part cultural. I came to the embedded world from writing
large apps on workstations. Most of the embedded software people were
more hardware oriented. We had very little in common. Fortunately
we could divide the work along the lines of hardware/ISR/driver and
the rest the software. OO and C++ were seen a slow, bloated, and
unecessary. 


>   * if there are ways that exception handling can be used without too much
>     runtime cost?


As exceptions haven't been thread safe so i really haven't had a chance
to consider this :-)


>   * if there are optimizations that could be applied (but aren't yet, or are
>     only in a limited sense) to compensate for the needs of an RTOS or
>     similar environment?

A big issue is changing configurations on the fly without
rebooting. This is very difficult and is very common.

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   Desperate measures require the invention of desperate times. 
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