📜 Design Philosophy

These are the core design tenets that libhal and libraries extending it must seek to achieve with every design choice, line written, and architecture change made.

D.1 Multi Targeted

libhal and the libraries that extend it, should work anywhere. So long as the appropriate compiler or cross compiler is used, the driver should do as it is intended. The exception is target libraries which are designated to execute for a particular target. Even so, those target libraries MUST be unit testable on any host machine.

D.2 Light Weight

libhal should keep its interfaces and utility code light weight, meaning such things do not allocate, and if they do only once, do not perform long/length copies, unless a copy was the desired operation,

D.3 General

libhal interfaces should be general, meaning that they do not include APIs, or configuration settings that are uncommon in most targets or specific to a particular target.

D.4 Minimalist

libhal aims to be as simple as possible and no simpler. Interfaces, utility functions, and libraries should be straight forward for most programmers to understand with added complexity only when it is necessary and no other options exist.

D.5 Safe

libhal and its style guide aim to use patterns and techniques that help reduce safety issues. Safety does NOT extend to runtime checks that determine if there exists architectural defects.

D.6 Tested & Testable

libhal code should be as testable and unit tested.

D.7 Compiled Quickly

libhal code should build fast and eliminate/replace any unnecessary dependencies that cause compile times to be long.

D.8 Portable

libhal code should not require or depend on any OS or target specific code or behaviors. libhal is designed to work anywhere and should not rely on OS.