WELCOME.md

The Exciting World of Ledger C

Knowing C will help you in this adventure. But not as much as it should. There are some fun twists when it comes to Ledger C. Explore them below. Memorize them. There will be a quiz...

Exceptions

C doesn't have them. So you don't have to think about bracketing, exception safety, RAII, try/catch, all that.

Well not on the Ledger. You have exceptions! Which means you also have out-of-band code paths, and you now have to worry about exception safety.

You can THROW a uint16_t like this THROW(0x9000).

Handling exceptions looks like this.

volatile int something = 0;
BEGIN_TRY {
    TRY {
        //do something;
    }
    CATCH(EXC_PARSE_ERROR) {
        //do something on parse error
    }
    CATCH_OTHER(e) {
        THROW(e);
    }
    FINALLY { }
}
END_TRY;

Exceptions that make it all the way to the top of the application are caught and returned as status codes from the APDU.

Gotchas

1. If a variable will be accessed both outside and inside the BEGIN_TRY/END_TRY block it must be volatile. The compiler doesn't expect these shenanigans and will optimize incorrectly if you don't.
2. Do not return in the TRY block. It will cause the Ledger to crash. Instead use a volatile variable to capture the result you want to return at the end.
3. Don't try to leave out blocks like CATCH_OTHER(e) and FINALLY. I don't know if that will work right and it's not worth the risk.

Implications

1. If you have some global state and an exception is thrown then, unless you do something about it, that global state will remain. That might be a very bad thing. As long as you use globals our way (see Globals Our Way) you should be safe.

Globals Our Way

static const globals are fine. static non-const are not fine for two reasons:

1. If you try to initialize them (which you would want to do!) then the app will crash. For example static int my_bool = 3; crashes whenever you try to read or write my_bool...
2. Instead of getting initialized to 0 like the C standard says, they are initialized to 0xA5. Yes this can cause the compiler to incorrectly optimize your code.

So just don't use static non-const globals. Instead we have globals.h which defines a large struct wher you can put your globals. At the beginning of the application we memset(&global, 0, sizeof(global)) to clear it all to zeros.

Anything inside of global.apdu will get cleared when an exception gets to the top of the app (see Exceptions). To benefit from this behavior you should never return an error code via the in-band way of sending bytes back. All errors should be sent via THROW.

Relocation

When we said static const globals were fine, we meant that they were possible. There is a major gotcha, however: if you initialize a static const value with a pointer to another static or static const value, the pointers might be incorrect and require relocation.

For example:

static const char important_string[] = "Important!";
static const char **important_string_ptrs = { important_string, NULL };
const char *str1 = important_string_ptrs[0];
const char *str2 = important_string;

str will now have the wrong value. str2 will not. The reason str1 has the wrong value is that the linker gets confused with a reference from one static const variable to another static variable on this platform. To resolve, you can use the PIC macro, which will fix broken pointers but never break a good pointer. Because of this, you can use it liberally and not have to worry about breaking anything:

static const char important_string[] = "Important!";
static const char **important_string_ptrs = { important_string, NULL };
const char *str1 = PIC(important_string_ptrs[0]); // necessary use of PIC
const char *str2 = PIC(important_string); // unnecessary but harmless use of PIC

Many of the UI functions call PIC for you, so just because a UI function accepts a data structure, doesn't mean that data structure is valid.

Dynamic Allocation

Nope. Don't even try. No malloc/calloc/free. Use globals (see Globals).