Though I've written C/C++ code for a long time, the unseen limitations on how memory was consumed on various MCU and SOC programming platforms have often tripped me up. As I'm about to build up code for my first large project for my NANO boards, which will likely use a fair amount of its resources, I'd like to be better prepared for any surprising and unexpected "gotchas" to look out for.
For example, on another SOC I recently worked on extensively (The Pololu.com wixel) I was very surprised to learn that function/method arguments and auto variables, which I'd normally expect to be stack allocated and recovered when a function returns were in fact permanently allocated for the life of the program! Wow! so on that platform, where I'd normally hate to "overwork" variables or reuse variables after their names no longer make sense, I had to adjust my coding to what I'd normally consider BAD for readability. Not to mention realizing that simple loop variables were better off allocated globally. Yecch!
Can those of you who have run into such unexpected coding issues in the Arduino environment share some "special" guidelines about things like this?
auto
changed from a storage duration specifier to a variable type specifier in C++11. For simplicity don't useauto
.