GCC Competitor: LLVM

I’ve used GCC for the better part of my career.  It’s worked fairly uniformly across many platforms:  x86, MIPS, PPC, ARM, AVR8, and AVR32.  Honestly, it is near and dear to my heart.

When I got wind of the Embedded.com article titled “Does GCC still have a future?“, I felt a little blind-sided.  After reading the article, however, my conclusion is that competition is often a good thing.

Check it out.  Maybe your next project can leverage LLVM for quicker build and execution times?

Emacs tip #1 – Cursor Movement

Why learn Emacs cursor movement keys?

• Keep your fingers on home row for greater speed and less fatigue.
• Enjoy richer navigation than by using built-in keyboard commands.
• Use the bindings in a lot more places than just Emacs.

Observers may be amazed how the cursor flies around as an accomplished Emacs user is at the keyboard.  Many people aren’t aware they can move the cursor so dramatically with so little hand movement.  Non-programmer types may have no idea they can do things like move the cursor forward or backward a word at a time.

Tidier Tables in “C” via Macros

Great article titled Reduce C-language coding errors with X macros outlines a way to use the C Preprocessor to create tidier tables.  Highly recommended reading for those of you who like data-driven solutions.

How many times have you used a “table” in C code?  Data-driven approaches are great, but often require you to manually keep table data in sync in multiple places in your code.  It’s a common maintenance issue in “C”.  This article describes ways to make the Preprocessor to do more of the work for you.  The result is fewer bugs and reduced workload when you update your tables.  The cost may be slightly lower readability for less experienced programmers.

Whether you chose to use this technique or not, you owe it to yourself to at least check it out.