Collaborate Disseminate
Lately, there has been a push for people to stop using programming languages that don’t promote memory safety. But as we still haven’t seen the death of some languages that …read more Continue reading Modernizing C Arrays for Greater Memory Safety
Firmware and software are both just code, right? How different could the code that runs Internet-scale distributed web stuff be from the code that runs a tiny microcontroller brain inside a personal hydroponics device? Night and day!
Ruth Grace Wong works in the former world, but moonlights as a manufacturing …read more
Continue reading Supercon: Ruth Grace Wong and Firmware From the Firehose
Computing is really all about order. If you can take data, apply an operation to it, and get the same result every single time, then you have a stable and reliable computing system.
So it makes total sense that there is Operator Precedence. This is also called Order of Operations, and it dictates which computations will be performed first, and which will be performed last. To get the same results every time, you must perform addition, multiplication, power functions, bitwise math, and all other calculations in a codified order.
The question I’ve had on my mind lately is, does this …read more
Continue reading Ask Hackaday: Is There a Legit Use for Operator Precedence?
A little while back, we were talking about utilizing compiler warnings as first step to make our C code less error-prone and increase its general stability and quality. We know now that the C compiler itself can help us here, but we also saw that there’s a limit to it. While it warns us about the most obvious mistakes and suspicious code constructs, it will leave us hanging when things get a bit more complex.
But once again, that doesn’t mean compiler warnings are useless, we simply need to see them for what they are: a first step. So today …read more
Continue reading Warnings On Steroids – Static Code Analysis Tools
What do Heartbleed, WannaCry, and million dollar iPhone bugs have in common? Continue reading The Internet Has a Huge C/C++ Problem and Developers Don’t Want to Deal With It
If there’s one thing C is known and (in)famous for, it’s the ease of shooting yourself in the foot with it. And there’s indeed no denying that the freedom C offers comes with the price of making it our own responsibility to tame and keep the language under control. On the bright side, since the language’s flaws are so well known, we have a wide selection of tools available that help us to eliminate the most common problems and blunders that could come back to bite us further down the road. The catch is, we have to really want it …read more
Continue reading Warnings Are Your Friend – A Code Quality Primer
Shared libraries are our best friends to extend the functionality of C programs without reinventing the wheel. They offer a collection of exported functions, variables, and other symbols that we can use inside our own program as if the content of the shared library was a direct part of our code. The usual way to use such libraries is to simply link against them at compile time, and let the linker resolve all external symbols and make sure everything is in place when creating our executable file. Whenever we then run our executable, the loader, a part of the operating …read more
Continue reading It’s All In The Libs – Building A Plugin System Using Dynamic Loading
In the first part of this series, we covered the basics of pointers in C, and went on to more complex arrangements and pointer arithmetic in the second part. Both times, we focused solely on pointers representing data in memory.
But data isn’t the only thing residing in memory. All the program code is accessible through either the RAM or some other executable type of memory, giving each function a specific address inside that memory as entry point. Once again, pointers are simply memory addresses, and to fully utilize this similarity, C provides the concept of function pointers. Function pointers …read more
Continue reading Directly Executing Chunks of Memory: Function Pointers In C
In our first part on pointers, we covered the basics and common pitfalls of pointers in C. If we had to break it down into one sentence, the main principle of pointers is that they are simply data types storing a memory address, and as long as we make sure that we have enough memory allocated at that address, everything is going to be fine.
In this second part, we are going to continue with some more advanced pointer topics, including pointer arithmetic, pointers with another pointer as underlying data type, and the relationship between arrays and pointers. But first, …read more
Continue reading When 4 + 1 Equals 8: An Advanced Take On Pointers In C
Pointers — you either love them, or you haven’t fully understood them yet. But before you storm off to the comment section now, pointers are indeed a polarizing subject and are both C’s biggest strength, and its major source of problems. With great power comes great responsibility. The internet and libraries are full of tutorials and books telling about pointers, and you can randomly pick pretty much any one of them and you’ll be good to go. However, while the basic principles of pointers are rather simple in theory, it can be challenging to fully wrap your head around their …read more