Windows-driver-samples VS bbqueue

The state machine example is definitely a very fitting use of goto, but it reminds me of another thing that seems to have become a rare skill but is very useful: flowcharting. Besides making people comfortable with goto in general, it also helps visualise control flow in ways that a lot of programmers these days don't realise, and it's unfortunate that a lot of courses seem to have omitted its teaching.

Also worth reading is "GOTO Considered Harmful Considered Harmful": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11056434

And here Microsoft provides us with lovely example of such ridiculous nesting.

That's a very memorable example, but ultimately the true cause of that monstrosity is a clearly stupid API design; this is the API for a file picker, the recommended replacement for an existing one that they wanted to deprecate. In the existing one, you fill in a structure and call a single function with a pointer to it. In its replacement, you need to call a dozen methods on an object, and check for "possible" errors on each call, even if probably 99% of them only do things like assign to a field in a now-opaque structure and can never produce an error. Then the example code must've been edited by someone with severe gotophobia. (Not all MS code is like that --- they have plenty of other example code that uses goto, e.g.: https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples/blob/mai... )

The source code for the sample can be found here. Check this code out to a local folder and use the included visual studio solution to open it up. You should be able to build this code as is; if it's telling you that you need spectre mitigated libraries to build it you can either acquire those via the visual studio installer or go to Project Properties > C++ > Code Generation > Spectre Mitigation and select disabled (I have it enabled so disabling it could cause issues, probably not though).

This project was my first experience working with device drivers, and uses the Windows devcon utility to disable and re-enable a device driver.

So a quick look at the Wikipedia site of "Virtual Audio Cables" reveals that it's based in n a custom windows driver. Based on that I would start here

Given that they're essential and worth about $1.8 million, then, it sounds like the proper solution would be to argue for the budget to engage a developer to write, test and sign a replacement driver. (Especially since the Intel 82930 USB test board is literally used by Microsoft as an archetypal example device in USB driver development documentation.)

Maybe corresponding Windows API? https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples/tree/master/audio/simpleaudiosample and https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/audio/getting-started-with-wdm-audio-drivers.

Well yes. But Linus is right on that one.

I wouldn't say Windows drivers were C++, more like "C with Classes" (and maybe a little bit C++)

Also, Windows drivers are usually much more convoluted than Linux drivers https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples

A more practical resource are the various driver samples Microsoft provides: https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples

I particularly like lock-free (wait-free?) SPSC queues because they're (relatively) easy to get right, and are extremely useful for buffering in embedded systems. I end up with something like this on almost every project:

One side of the queue is a peripheral like a serial port that needs to be fed/drained like clockwork to avoid losing data or glitching (e.g. via interrupts or DMA), and the other side is usually software running on the main thread, that wants to be able to work at its own pace and also go to sleep sometimes.

An SPSC queue fits this use-case nicely. James Munns has a fancy one written in Rust [1], and I have a ~100 line C template [2].

[1] https://github.com/jamesmunns/bbqueue

[2] https://gist.github.com/ohazi/40746a16c7fea4593bd0b664638d70...

I would be interested in what you think of something like BBQueue:

https://github.com/jamesmunns/bbqueue