There's also the aspect that a lot of the really good packages for dealing with e.g. text or the OS don't translate well to the constraints of embedded systems.

There's also the aspect that a lot of the really good packages for dealing with e.g. text or the OS don't translate well to the constraints of embedded systems. So I could go to all the trouble to have a cascading compilation all in pure c or c++, so the git SHA is written into a given source file, which is in turn built and flashed onto my target device. Or I could use an interpreted language for all the off-the-device operations, completely skip over configuring a separate development environment, and do it all in a fraction of the time. The only reason I want to be compiling c or c++ for the host is because I'm also writing a driver at the same time, and even then...