Embedded Systems Design - August 2008 - (Page 43)

0808esd.p09, 43 7/17/08 11:30 AM Page 43 ad index code and reuse it. I’ve been doing it for 25 years now. The products I currently from page 9 ship contain pieces of code I ﬁrst wrote that long ago. To be sure, I give some to be very tempting candidates for this thought to the interface when I write. abstraction), the decision to use Java Yes, some of the pieces have evolved instead of C could make a 2:1 impact over the years. Yes, there is some time on their electric bill! That is not down spent on adapting it to the new need, in the noise! which detracts from the productivity I’m all in favor of leveraging the gain. However, there are signiﬁcant productivity of programmers (includgains in two areas: ﬁrst, the software aring my own), but we need to come to chitecture of the project is already specterms with some hard facts. The ﬁrst is iﬁed because of the reuse so I don’t that interpreted code (including JIT have to cominvent pile) Why are we throwing so much effort it from by defdown a guaranteed rat hole? scratch inition every time, and second, every chunk of can never be competitively efﬁcient for code dropped in from a previous projproduction. Anything that can be resolved once at compile time should not ect is a chunk of code that has been debugged and ﬁeld tested, hence the debe reinvented every time a function is bugging cycle is shortened and the called. This is a matter of fundamental reliability increased. physics and cannot be circumvented. I have standardized on a single Why are we throwing so much effort CPU family so even my driver developdown a guaranteed rat hole? Second, that energy should be more productive- ment is minimized, as is my learning ly channeled at techniques that increase curve, both on the hardware and the tools. Every time a new project comes the level of abstraction while providing in the door, I look for a recently comoptimization that closes the performpleted project most like the new one ance gap. Higher levels of abstraction and copy the entire project into a new offer opportunities for optimizations directory. Then I delete what doesn’t that the programmer might not think apply and start changing and adding to of or recognize and that would be prewhat is left. I can turn out a fully decluded by details that must be speciﬁed bugged control project with graphic at lower levels of coding. Maybe a state machine with an unusual assortment of LCD and touch, serial, and Ethernet in state values would work more efﬁcient- a matter of a few weeks. I can also port to new hardware in a matter of days— ly than anything the programmer enviall in C with judicious use of assembly. sioned. Maybe a lookup table would be That’s my version of reuse. It’s the a better solution than a numerical algoonly version I know of that really rithm or set of branches. Its similar to works! what a switch() statement offers a C —Wilton Helm compiler—the freedom to consider difEmbedded System Resources ferent ways of accomplishing the task. Golden, CO Sadly, we’ve probably spent 100x as many man-hours tweaking JIT runtimes as we have doing this sort of exWe welcome your feedback. Letters to the editor may be edited. Send your comments to ploration. Richard Nass at rnass@techinsights.com or As far as code reuse, the only techﬁll out one of our feedback forms online, nique I know of that works is to write under the article you wish to discuss. 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Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Embedded Systems Design - August 2008

Embedded Systems Design - August 2008 Contents Number Include Parity Bit Programmer's Toolbox Cover Feature: Virtualization for Embedded X86 Multiprocessor Applications Wanted: Industry Standards for Benchmarking Embedded VMM Hypervisors Achieving Cache Coherence in a MIPS32 Multicore Design Memory Allocation in C Advertising Index Break Points Marketplace

Embedded Systems Design - August 2008

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