Introduction
Well, I have lots of sparse links and forgotten books about project development in C. I decided to put here for my own reference and as a recomendation for people asking me (I will «copy and paste from here).
Style guides
A recommended coding standard
OLD content bellow
Most of my students produce horrible code from the point of view of style.
There are lots of diverging style guides for C programming, so a couple of small and coherent ones will be sufficient for my pourpose.
- ‘C’ Style Guide and Programming Guidelines. Peter K. van der Vlugt
- C++ Programming Style Guidelines. Geotechnical Software Services
Other (too complex for starters).
Repositories management
For professional developers (and not so professionals), it is a must to use a «repositories» for managing the code and documents of an evolving project.
Actually, I’m using «mercurial» for this pourpose BUT …
My recommendation is to use «GIT». The reason is: it is distributed, it is very well accepted by the community.
You need a hosting service for your code repository. I recommend to start with «bitbucket» if you want a private repository, but if your project is clearly open, you can use «github» or «gitorius».
Industry standards
C language is prone to errors but it is the only option for developing embedded systems. In order to reduce the amount of typical coding errors, it is a good idea to use some of the well stablished industry standards that try to minimise these errors.
The recommendation is to elect one of these (I suggest MISRA ):
- Guidelines for the Use of the C Language in Critical Systems (MISRA C: 2012); Motor Industry Software Reliability Association,2013. MISRA site
- The CERT C Coding Standard: 98 Rules for Developing Safe, Reliable and Secure Systems; Robert C. Seacord, 2014. Cert C official site
- Embedded C Coding Standard; Michal Barr, 2008
Bug detection at the developing stage
ASSERT
8 tips for squashing bugs using ASSERT in C
Others
I’m reading
- Test Driven Development for Embedded C (Pragmatic Programmers); James W. Grenning, 2011
To be considered
- Linux for embedded and real-time applications; Doug Abbott,2013