Mentor Blogs

What is the key objective when you write some code? The obvious answer is that you want to impart some specific functionality to the device that you are programming. That would be fine, if just designing and writing code was all that a software engineer was required to do. There are several programming languages that would enable code to be written very rapidly. An example, that I have an affection … Read More

C, Overloading, Forth, Operators

Life is often about compromise, but embedded developers really are not good at that. Code generation is a context in which compromise is somewhat inevitable and we call it “optimization”. All modern compilers perform optimization, of course. Some do a better job than others. A lot of the time, the compiler simply guesses which optimization will produce the best result without knowing what the designer … Read More

C, Optimization, Low Power, Power

As I am still off on my vacation, we have another guest blogger. This time it is Meador Inge, a member of the Mentor Graphics embedded software products engineering team, who, just like Scott last week, has chosen a subject that interests me greatly and, by coincidence, picks up on theme that I highlighted recently. -Colin C is great, but C alone makes you a bad programmer. My introduction into computing … Read More

C

When I first started programming, the only language available to me was Fortran. I punched cards with my code and later received back a print-out with [mostly] error messages. I was always intrigued by being able to program a computer in such a straightforward way. I understood what assembly language or even machine code was all about, but felt that high level languages had a mystique. In due course, … Read More

C

Two weeks ago, I posted a blog about heap contiguity, where I proposed an idea for using an MMU to solve fragmentation problems, which I had previously discussed in a Web seminar. I have worked in the embedded software business for many years and have met and worked with a lot of fine people. It seems that quite a few of the read this blog, which is great. Two of them contacted me by email following … Read More

Heap, C, Memory, Dynamic Memory, MMU

A while ago I did a Webinar looking at C++ for embedded applications. It was well attended and well received and there were lots of questions and comments, which is always very satisfying. I observed that a number of people were specifically interested in dynamic memory allocation in C and C++ and the challenges that are presented to embedded and real time programmers. So I developed a further Webinar … Read More

Heap, C, Memory, Dynamic Memory, MMU

I have often talked and written about my thoughts on programming languages. In particular the fact that there really is no language that was designed with embedded programming specifically in mind. Historically, there was assembly language, but that is rarely used for large scale coding nowadays. Intel promoted PL/M many years ago, but that has fallen by the wayside. C and C++ are the key languages … Read More

C, RTOS