5 ms·

I’m not an embedded developer, but my guess is that if they’re not even using dynamic memory, I doubt they need or want anything that C++ has to offer.

pknopf 9y ago
I can see people arguing for object oriented over procedural. As I type that, I realize I've recently learned to love Go, so maybe it is my bias.
tarmon 9y ago
There is still a lot to be gained by strong typing even in projects where everything is statically allocated.
jwhite 9y ago
That's more a matter of experience and attitude -- even simple things like reference types are nice. Also, templates offer a lot of abstraction power that can be used to model the hardware nicely, without sacrificing efficiency. Many embedded programmers come from a background that doesn't expose them to those sorts of ideas though.
- carlmr 9y ago
  Can confirm, C++ has some nice features which I'd even like without malloc. OTOH I'm already horrified at the code quality problems pretty much every embedded shop faces. C++ would only make this matter worse. As a software inclined embedded guy I also often think of what would be possible if we switched to C++. But then I think of what's probable.
bb88 9y ago
Many people need in memory databases and linked lists (or binary trees) to hash information and sort it. There's a case to be made for an OO style program where I create an object and give it a chunk of memory to manage a B-tree, so I can keep my memory from being fragmented, but using C++ for that is serious overkill.
monocasa 9y ago
RAII is absolutely killer. Managing real time priorities with lock_guards so that you can never forget to drop priority will win over almost any grizzly old firmware engineer.
Matthias247 9y ago
Even without dynamic memory there's ton of useful things: Namespaces, References, collection types (std::array, string_view, intrusive containers, etc.), RAII (release mutexes at scope ends), strong typing, proper encapsulation, interfaces, etc.
- Symmetry 9y ago
  In general tools for constraining hardware complexity like namespaces and encapsulation are a lot less important for the project sizes where you're typically working with embedded systems. For the rest they mostly provide some benefit but that's offset by the danger of a move to a much, much larger and more complicated language in an environment where many people writing code are primarily EEs and most C++ answers they Google will provide solutions inappropriate for embedded development. And I say this as someone who was one of those EEs when he started out.

pknopf 9y ago

I can see people arguing for object oriented over procedural. As I type that, I realize I've recently learned to love Go, so maybe it is my bias.

tarmon 9y ago

There is still a lot to be gained by strong typing even in projects where everything is statically allocated.

jwhite 9y ago

That's more a matter of experience and attitude -- even simple things like reference types are nice. Also, templates offer a lot of abstraction power that can be used to model the hardware nicely, without sacrificing efficiency. Many embedded programmers come from a background that doesn't expose them to those sorts of ideas though.

carlmr 9y ago
Can confirm, C++ has some nice features which I'd even like without malloc. OTOH I'm already horrified at the code quality problems pretty much every embedded shop faces. C++ would only make this matter worse. As a software inclined embedded guy I also often think of what would be possible if we switched to C++. But then I think of what's probable.

bb88 9y ago

Many people need in memory databases and linked lists (or binary trees) to hash information and sort it. There's a case to be made for an OO style program where I create an object and give it a chunk of memory to manage a B-tree, so I can keep my memory from being fragmented, but using C++ for that is serious overkill.

monocasa 9y ago

RAII is absolutely killer. Managing real time priorities with lock_guards so that you can never forget to drop priority will win over almost any grizzly old firmware engineer.

Matthias247 9y ago

Even without dynamic memory there's ton of useful things: Namespaces, References, collection types (std::array, string_view, intrusive containers, etc.), RAII (release mutexes at scope ends), strong typing, proper encapsulation, interfaces, etc.

Symmetry 9y ago
In general tools for constraining hardware complexity like namespaces and encapsulation are a lot less important for the project sizes where you're typically working with embedded systems. For the rest they mostly provide some benefit but that's offset by the danger of a move to a much, much larger and more complicated language in an environment where many people writing code are primarily EEs and most C++ answers they Google will provide solutions inappropriate for embedded development. And I say this as someone who was one of those EEs when he started out.