C or C++

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by Gdeaver

I always thought the problem with object oriented languages and microcontrolers was the async nature of OO. In other words OO is terrible for RTOS's.

Actually C++ is quickly gaining in popularity in the embedded world. The last project I worked on at Motorola was almost entirely C++ code running on an embedded control board under the pSOS and OSE RTOSes.

[TimCraig]

Originally Posted by Gdeaver

I always thought the problem with object oriented languages and microcontrolers was the async nature of OO. In other words OO is terrible for RTOS's.

Object oriented languages aren't any more asynchronous than purely procedural languages. If you're talking about the message passing paradigm, that's just OO speak for function calls.

That said, however, most microcontroller programs have to deal with asynchronous events.

[chris31]

http://www.virginiafirst.org/workshop_info.shtml

I figure it just a typo but look at "Beginning Programming - part 1". Maybe they know something we dont know. Im pretty sure its a typo though.

[X-Istence]

I screw it all. Let's go back to the PBASIC boards from a few years ago.

[Bongle]

Originally Posted by efoote868

Too bad its not so easy to describe #define, or any other preprocessors to them .

For #define, I told the kids on my team it is essentially the same as a find-replace on your code before it actually gets compiled. That explanation is good enough for what we used it for (#define leftMotor1 pwm01).

[JamesBrown]

Originally Posted by thegathering

We use C with an IDE called MPLab by Microchip.


*edit* I wish we could use C++ though, then maybe we'd get some more programmers on our team. C tends to scare them off. (maybe that's MPLab's icky-sticky interface rather than the language itself )

Use eclipse, it is much nicer than MPLAB

Also I think C is the easier of the two languages, the things that c++ simplified (Classes Structs etc) are really not important for what we are doing.

[RoboMadi]

Originally Posted by JamesBrown

Use eclipse, it is much nicer than MPLAB

Last year, one of our programmers was used to Eclipse, and he pretty much hooked up everyone to use it. Its really nice, especially the way it breaks down the code.
C or C++, as far as writing the code, theres not much of a difference. I'm just waiting when FIRST will upgrade their systems, and we'll have some other language to play with...
But on a bright note, responsive time for C is much faster than any other language.

[MikeDubreuil]

Originally Posted by RoboMadi

I'm just waiting when FIRST will upgrade their systems, and we'll have some other language to play with...

I hope this never happens. C is a de facto standard in embedded software. In FIRST a good application of C++ is creating a dashboard program.

[Stuart]

I personaly would like to see a move to C++ . .mainly because I think its easier to think of a robot in terms of objects than not. and for the most part any thing you write in C can be put directly in to C++ with out any changes.

not saying that we take the jump all the way to java, (java.eguals(the.suck())) , but saying that a move to OO would be nice.

[Matt Krass]

Originally Posted by Stuart

I personaly would like to see a move to C++ . .mainly because I think its easier to think of a robot in terms of objects than not. and for the most part any thing you write in C can be put directly in to C++ with out any changes.

not saying that we take the jump all the way to java, (java.eguals(the.suck())) , but saying that a move to OO would be nice.

C++ would be a pretty hefty extra load on the processor, and for minimal gain. As far as objects go, I've found structs are pretty good, I'm working in my spare time on an object based robot API using all structs, its very doable.

Last year I used very modular code utilizing the same method, well enough I could pick up and move parts of my code in to another teams to help them, with the only change being adding the interface code to theirs. Once they had it, we were able to "plug" code modules in, it was very effective.