Application Note: Object-Oriented Programming in C
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@section ab_goals What does it do?
The main goals of the QP/C™ framework are:
- to provide a reusable **architecture** based on active objects (actors), which is _safer_ and easier to understand than "free-threading" with a traditional RTOS.
- to provide a simple-to-use coding techniques for hierarchical state machines, with which to implement the behavior of active objects.
- to provide efficient and thread-safe event-driven mechanisms for active objects to communicate, such as direct event passing and publish-subscribe.
- to provide event-driven timing services (time events).
- to provide a selection of built-in real-time kernels to run the QP applications, such as the cooperative @ref qv "QV kernel", the preemptive non-blocking @ref qk "QK kernel", and the preemptive blocking @ref qxk "QXK kernel".
- to provide testing support for applications based on software tracing (@ref qs "Q-Spy").
- to provide portability layer and ready-to-use ports to @ref ports_rtos "3rd-party RTOSes" and desktop operating systems such as @ref posix "Linux" and @ref win32 "Windows".
- to provide a target for modeling and automatic code generation from the QM modeling tool.
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@section ab_special What's special about it?
The QP/C™ framework is a unique offering on the embedded software market. It provides a modern, reusable **architecture** of embedded applications, which combines object-orientation with the particular model of concurrency, known as active objects (actors). This architecture is generally **safer**, more responsive and easier to understand than naked threads of a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS).
@subsection oop Object Orientation
Even though it is written in @ref misra "MISRA-compliant" ANSI-C, QP/C™ is fundamentally an **object-oriented** framework, which means that the framework itself and your applications derived from the framework are fundamentally composed of classes and only classes can have @ref sm "state machines" associated with them.