Representing and Manipulating Hardware in Standard C and C++
This paper discusses the basics of hardware manipulation using C and C++. It focuses on the common idioms for controlling devices that you can write in Standard C or Standard C++.
Both C and C++ provide the following features that aid embedded programming:
- bitwise operators and bitfields for packing data and manipulating individual bits in
hardware registers - the const qualifier for identifying ROMable data
- the volatile qualifier for identifying objects, such as memory-mapped device registers,
that may change due to events outside a program’s control
C++ does not add any features specifically for embedded programming, but classes can
be extremely helpful in hiding messy hardware details behind cleaner interfaces.
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