c compiler

9 Articles

Warnings Are Your Friend – A Code Quality Primer

November 6, 2018 by 63 Comments

If there’s one thing C is known and (in)famous for, it’s the ease of shooting yourself in the foot with it. And there’s indeed no denying that the freedom C offers comes with the price of making it our own responsibility to tame and keep the language under control. On the bright side, since the language’s flaws are so well known, we have a wide selection of tools available that help us to eliminate the most common problems and blunders that could come back to bite us further down the road. The catch is, we have to really want it ourselves, and actively listen to what the tools have to say.

We often look at this from a security point of view and focus on exploitable vulnerabilities, which you may not see as valid threat or something you need to worry about in your project. And you are probably right with that, not every flaw in your code will lead to attackers taking over your network or burning down your house, the far more likely consequences are a lot more mundane and boring. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care about them.

Buggy, unreliable software is the number one cause for violence against computers, and whether you like it or not, people will judge you by your code quality. Just because Linus Torvalds wants to get off Santa’s naughty list, doesn’t mean the technical field will suddenly become less critical or loses its hostility, and in a time where it’s never been easier to share your work with the world, reliable, high quality code will prevail and make you stand out from the masses.

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Xilinx FPGAs In C For Free

December 17, 2015 by 16 Comments

When you think of developing with FPGAs, you usually think of writing Verilog or VHDL. However, there’s been a relatively recent trend to use C to describe what an FPGA should do and have tools that convert that to an FPGA. However, at least in the case of Xilinx parts, this capability is only available in their newest tool (Vivado), and Vivado doesn’t target the older lower-cost FPGAs that most low-cost development boards use.

[Sleibso] who blogs for Xilinx, has an answer. It turns out you can use the Vivado C compilation tools to generate code for older FPGAs; it just involves a less convenient workflow. Vivado (even the free version) generates unique files that the rest of the tool uses to pick up compiled C code. However, it also generates RTL (Verilog or VHDL) as a by-product, and you can import that into the older ISE tool (which has a perfectly fine free version) and treat it as you would any other RTL files.

There’s an example of using the Vivado tool in the video below. [Sleibso] points out that the video is three years old, and the talk about licensing on the video is out of date. The free tools now including this capability. [Sleibso] talks about using a Spartan 6, but the same split workflow should work with most devices ISE supports.

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