The Horror in the Standard Library

Post by rbanffy » Sun, May 07, 2017, 1:02 AM UTC

mighty_atomic_c wrote: post #140

uep wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience this is normal for embedded development; particularly for consumer electronics. Part of the reason some developers in this space have to wear so many hats is that the pace in consumer electronics is unforgiving. I don't think my current employer is unusual either. Hopefully, the number of frameworks at the top, and the size of your individual programs are relatively small (so that 1-3 aren't nightm…

Can confirm. I had a trippy experience where I had on one monitor some RTL+simulation for our chip up for view, on another I had the PCB schematic I had helped design, and on my third I had the GUI and embedded toolchain development environments up, and on my desk I had an oscilloscope measuring that PCB running that firmware. It was basically rolling through the list and really fun!

Post by nickpsecurity » Sun, May 07, 2017, 1:16 AM UTC

kosma wrote: post #89

bostik wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't trust libraries blindly, even one of the most used and broadly adopted ones There is a corollary to development and debugging. When things break in mysterious ways, we tend to go through a familiar song and dance. As experience, skills and even personal networks grow, we can find ourselves diving ever further in the following chain. 1. "It must be in my code." -- hours of debugging 2. "Okay, it must be so…

> 10. "Where is my chip lab grade oscilloscope?" 11. "Shit, where do I borrow a spectrum analyzer and a set of near field probes? These things cost an arm and a leg!" Yes, STM32F1 MCUs generate inference that jams GPS receivers. No, it's not documented anywhere.

Post by kps » Sun, May 07, 2017, 2:17 AM UTC

rjsw wrote: post #84

bostik wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't trust libraries blindly, even one of the most used and broadly adopted ones There is a corollary to development and debugging. When things break in mysterious ways, we tend to go through a familiar song and dance. As experience, skills and even personal networks grow, we can find ourselves diving ever further in the following chain. 1. "It must be in my code." -- hours of debugging 2. "Okay, it must be so…

The furthest that I have got down the list was trying to bring up the first prototype of a board that had been designed with too long traces on the PCB between the SoC and DRAM. If you tried to read a location in memory you got the value of the page table entry for that address rather than the address contents.

Post by syngrog66 » Sun, May 07, 2017, 3:43 AM UTC

bostik wrote: post #51

bluejekyll wrote: post #29

OMG, as I was reading this I thought, "man, this reminds me of a bug I ran into with std::string back in 2000", A few sentences later, and this is also about std::string and the STL. Mine was different though, after tracking down a memory leak that was happening with the creation of just new empty string, I discovered in the stdlib that there was a shared pointer to the empty string with a reference count of how many…

> you can't trust libraries blindly, even one of the most used and broadly adopted ones There is a corollary to development and debugging. When things break in mysterious ways, we tend to go through a familiar song and dance. As experience, skills and even personal networks grow, we can find ourselves diving ever further in the following chain. 1. "It must be in my code." -- hours of debugging 2. "Okay, it must be so…

Post by ethbro » Sun, May 07, 2017, 5:41 AM UTC

makomk wrote: post #151

kosma wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 10. "Where is my chip lab grade oscilloscope?" 11. "Shit, where do I borrow a spectrum analyzer and a set of near field probes? These things cost an arm and a leg!" Yes, STM32F1 MCUs generate inference that jams GPS receivers. No, it's not documented anywhere.

You'd be surprised how much you can find out just with a $10 TV tuner dongle and a piece of coax with a short section of the outer braid trimmed off at once end.