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I know that using Global Variables in programming may create lots of problems in long term , like , Bugs , Lags and more . I am working on a program which has more than 5 functions which need to access global variables something like this.

int Name;
int Age;
int Weight;
String EyeColour;


void AddValues(int N, int A , int W , String EC){
    Name = N;
    Age = A;
    Weight = W;
    EyeColour = EC;
}


// All the functions below use those Global Variables

void function2(){
    ...
}

void function2(){
    ...
}

void function3(){
    ...
}

void function4(){
    ...
}

 void function5(){
    ...
 }

But according to this article

I should avoid using global variables to avoid future problems so I wrapped them up inside a struct. Like this.

struct Person{
    

int Name;
int Age;
int Weight;
String EyeColour;


}

Now my main question is, should I declare the structure variable globally? Will it avoid the problems which could be created by global variables ?

If I declare the struct variable globally will it be equivalent to declaring variables globally instead of the structure?

Or

Should I declare the structure variable inside all the functions instead of declaring globally?

So that all functions can work flawlessly without any global variable problems.

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4
  • This seems to be a general C/C++ question rather than an Arduino question. To amswer the general question--it depends, looks like a canonical class example. Commented Jun 17, 2021 at 11:38
  • 3
    This is actually relevant to Arduino programming, or any chip with small memory. The cited article is fine for big systems, but when memory is tight there are other considerations that may make it worth your time keeping track of globals. In big systems we can expect the automatic stack handling to take care of everything in the background without having to think about stack and/or heap crashing into working memory. Not so when you only have 2K total... and stack collisions can be pretty mysterious! Commented Jun 17, 2021 at 12:05
  • Dwelling on this question for academic purposes or extreme cases (where there's lots of data (i.e. audio sampling)) is great. But most Arduino programs I have seen do not use that many variables. So making Arduino sketch variables global (notice I'm not including Arduino libraries!) is likely fine. Commented Jun 17, 2021 at 13:00
  • globals are to be generally avoided when feasible, not 100% banned always. Commented Jun 19, 2021 at 8:44

1 Answer 1

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1

Create a class from the 4 variables (I don't have a compiler at hand, so forgive any compiler errors):

class Person
{
public:
    void Person(int N, int A , int W , String EC);

private:
    int Name;
    int Age;
    int Weight;
    String EyeColour;
}

Create the implementation of Person in the Person.cpp file.

About the functions, if they only relay (or mostly rely) on the 4 properties (Name, Age, Weight, EyeColor), make the a method (function) inside the class.

Decide if a function should be in a method depends upon many thing, but the most important question is: does it belong (well enough) to the class or not?

Now in the Arduino.ino you can make one instance (or more if you need more).

Person _person;

Preferably, I add an underscore for global variables (and instance variables).

Also, I would avoid using String as changing it will cause dynamic memory allocation changes, which can be very bad in a 2K SRAM system. Try to make constant string arrays (with a max length).

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2
  • 1
    Better still, eye colour could be an enum... Commented Jun 17, 2021 at 13:52
  • @Majenko Indeed, if the number of possibilities is fixed (gender used to be a boolean) Commented Jun 18, 2021 at 8:14

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