Audience

The primary intended audience of this document is professional C++ developers who want to understand bare metal development a little bit better, get to know how to use their favourite programming language in an embedded environment, and probably bring their C++ skills to an “expert” level. Why professional? Because bare metal platform has lots of limitations. In most cases no exceptions and no runtime type information (RTTI) support will be available. In many cases the dynamic memory allocation will also be excluded. In order to be able to use C++ effectively you will have to have deep knowledge of existing C++ idioms, constructs and STL contents. You must know how your favourite data structures are implemented and whether it is possible to reuse them in your environment. If it is not possible to use the STL (or any other library) code “as is”, you will have to implement a reduced version of it, and it is better to know how the library developers implemented the feature and how to make it work with the constrains of your environment.

The professional embedded developers with intermediate knowledge of C++ may also find this document useful. They will probably benefit from lots of C++ insights and will have several “eureka” moments with “I didn't know I could do that!!!” kind of thoughts.

If your C++ knowledge doesn't go much beyond polymorphism and virtual functions, if template meta-programming doesn't mean anything to you, probably you are not ready to use C++ in the embedded environment and this document will probably be too complex to understand. I'd like to emphasise the fact that this is NOT a C++ tutorial. There are lots of resources on the web that teach conventional C++ with OS services, exceptions and RTTI. My personal opinion is that you have to master C++ in regular environment before using it effectively in the bare metal world.