I recently interviewed for an embedded position, and had a set of similar questions. The right answer is, of course, "It depends". If you've got 6 bytes of fre

I recently interviewed for an embedded position, and had a set of similar questions. The right answer is, of course, "It depends". If you've got 6 bytes of free code space and/or you're scrambling for RAM, you look at everything for space savings. If the hardware team comes to you apologetically and says, "We're sorry, but for cost reasons we have to /double/ the amount of DRAM and flash and give you a faster, more power efficient SOC" then you may not have to worry about this level of detail. Both of these have happened to me on prior projects. There are no fixed answers. (Whenever I've gotten one of these types of questions in an interview, I try to have a broader conversation on the subject rather supply the answer they are looking for. If that goes badly, it's a big red flag).