The fact that some C++ developers use the ‘inline’ keyword so much has always been a conundrum to me — I’ve never liked it. Why? First and foremost because it clutters up header files and exposes implementation details to the users of a class. Most likely, inline aficionados believe that these disadvantages are more than […]
“What’s the meaning of goodness if there isn’t a little badness to overcome?” ― Anne Revere The code below is part of a C graphics processing library, which parses data in the venerable bitmap (BMP) file format. A bitmap file consists of a two parts: a header and the pixel data block. More specifically, a […]
There’s a rather obscure feature in C99 which allows you to put the ‘static’ keyword between the brackets when declaring array-like parameters to functions, as in
|
1 2 3 4 5 |
void transform(uint8_t buffer[static 42]) { ... } |
What this means, in a nutshell, is that the caller of this function is expected to pass an array of at least 42 uint8_t’s. Calling ‘transform’ like this […]
“Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué.” (“The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route.”) ― George Sand, Letter to Armand Barbès, 12 May 1867” Exactly one year ago, I started this series on pointers, but what I really wanted to blog about […]
“A teacher is never a giver of truth; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself.” — Bruce Lee In part I of this series, I explained what pointers are in general, how they are similar to arrays, and — more importantly — where, when, and why […]
Sometimes, it is desirable to perform computations already at compile-time — either for efficiency or to avoid redundancy. Alas, what a compiler can compute at compile-time is rather limited — mostly just a combination of unary and binary operators. What if you need to do something more complex? For the sake of illustration, I chose […]