Getting Started

Before you install a single thing, let's answer one question first: what right does C++ have to be on a microcontroller? The opening piece takes the two old impressions — "C++ is bloated" and "C++ is just OOP" — and puts them on the scale with four firmwares that differ only in how they blink an LED: binary size, instructions, and when errors surface, all three dimensions are measured numbers, and you can reproduce every one of them. The second piece then answers "where did these bad impressions come from": from C with Classes in 1979 to the 1990s Embedded C++ feature-cutting affair, every historical claim carries a source.

On the environment side, the road starts at the Renode observatory, runs through the anatomy of the toolchain, a first firmware of your own, debugging, and flashing on real hardware, and ends with clangd making sense of this cross-compiled codebase.

The Opening

STARTFINISHWhy C++, and by what right?→STARTFINISHA short history of C++: where the bad reputation came from→STARTFINISHRenode observatory: no board, so who gets the final say?→STARTFINISHWorking environment: the four things you installed — what exactly are they?→STARTFINISHYour very own firmware: adding a target to the repo→STARTFINISHDebugging: from sampling through the glass to stopping to inspect the scene→STARTFINISHReal hardware: flashing your first real board, getting UART up and running→STARTFINISHclangd: teaching the editor to understand cross-compiled code→