Collaborate Disseminate
It wasn’t long ago that we introduced you to a web site, the Godbolt compiler explorer, that allows the visitor to compile code using a slew of compilers and compare their output. We suspect some number of readers said, “Wow! I can use that!”, while perhaps everyone else said, “Huh?” …read more
Let’s be honest, no one likes to see their program crash. It’s a clear sign that something is wrong with our code, and that’s a truth we don’t like to see. We try our best to avoid such a situation, and we’ve seen how compiler warnings and other static code analysis tools can help us to detect and prevent possible flaws in our code, which could otherwise lead to its demise. But what if I told you that crashing your program is actually a great way to improve its overall quality? Now, this obviously sounds a bit counterintuitive, after all …read more
Continue reading Crash your code – Lessons Learned From Debugging Things That Should Never Happen™
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
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
We don’t use a GUI IDE, but if we did, it would most certainly be something along the lines of [Martin]’s embedded-IDE project. We’ve always felt that most IDEs are just fancy wrappers around all the tools that we use anyway: Makefiles, diff, git, ctags, and an editor. [Martin]’s project makes them less fancy, more transparent, and more customizable, while retaining the functionality. That’s the hacker’s way — putting together proven standard tools that already work.
The code editor he uses is QScintilla, which uses clang for code completion. The “template” system for new projects? He uses …read more
