Odin Holmes

Odin Holmes has been programming bare metal embedded systems for 15+ years and as any honest nerd admits most of that time was spent debugging his stupid mistakes. With the advent of the 100x speedup of template metaprogramming provided by C++11 his current mission began: teach the compiler to find his stupid mistakes at compile time so he has more free time for even more template metaprogramming. Odin Holmes is the author of the kvasir::bit library, a DSL which wraps bare metal special function register interactions allowing full static checking and a considerable efficiency gain over common practice. He is also active in building and refining the tools needed for this task such as the brigand MPL library and the kvasir::mpl. He is also the embedded chair of the SG14 working group and co-organizer of the embo.io bare metal embedded conference. He has spoken at every major C++ conference in Europe and North America.

Agent-based class design – a step towards betters customizations points

Apr 09, 2020

Abstracting a set of functionalities into a class which provides a higher level interface often requires tough design decisions. Users who do not have the exact requirements for which the abstraction is optimized will suffer a syntactic or runtime overhead as a result. Alexandrescu’s famous “policy-based design” provides a mechanism to allow the user to extend and customize an existing abstraction in order to fine-tune its functionality for many different use cases. This is however limited to use cases where each policy more or less represents a compile-time strategy pattern.

Alas, not everything is a strategy pattern. In this talk I will explore the viability of a more agent-pattern-like paradigm where each policy knows its requirements and publishes its capabilities. In this paradigm, glue code connecting any valid set of policies is automatically generated using template metaprogramming. This allows much more powerful customizations while maintaining static linkage.