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This should be titled "A Modern -OPEN SOURCE- C Development Environment". If you work in the embedded space for a large OEM, ODM, or integration house, you won

This should be titled "A Modern -OPEN SOURCE- C Development Environment". If you work in the embedded space for a large OEM, ODM, or integration house, you won't see any of this ... you will see all commercial environments with big price tags for seats e.g. compilers will be ARMC, Green Hills, IAR; for DAST you'll see tools from Synopsys or Cadence (same for virtual prototyping); lots of ISO compliance tools from hard-to-remember small companies that do that for a living and charge a cool mil to setup and audit ... for CI/CD you will likely see GitLab if not home grown suites. Gnu tools are some of the worst. Containers? 30+ years at this with 10 major contracts with big companies (and dozens of smaller ones) and I've only seen one company use containers and that was for virtual prototyping. C environments move at 1/100th the speed of webdev because product cycles happen in 6-12 months: literally no time to bring up a new system that breaks everything (and for no real benefit).

DoingIsLearning 3y ago
> If you work in the embedded space for a large OEM, ODM, or integration house > Containers? 30+ years at this with 10 major contracts with big companies (and dozens of smaller ones) and I've only seen one company use containers and that was for virtual prototyping. There are _a_lot_ of small and medium size businesses working with embedded devices with limited on-site resources, and those will usually use external contractors. In that case containers are very useful to share an Automated Test environment. The alternative is a long back and forth or spending time on-site supporting teams with wildly varying skill levels. Also as someone else mentioned when an old client asks for a new feature, the ability to take a snapshot in time is a huge time saver, rather than trying to replicate that build environment from scratch.
- demondemidi 3y ago
  I'm highly skeptical of the benefits of containers in the embedded space. The inertia required to set them up and maintain them, and train customers to use them is massive. I'm sure some people benefit somewhere, but in my experience people want a zip file of your code base, platform support package version, and compiler version, ... that's 99% of it. Working with ARC/MSP430/ATMEL/PIC/Cortex-M devices for decades I have rarely seen a codebase over 10 megabytes of customer C code.
P_I_Staker 3y ago
A million dollars?!?!? I think we pay like $60-150k per head. That doesn't all go to one company. Perhaps if you have a 20+ person team it's possible that a supplier charges "a cool mil", but I'm pretty skeptical. If you have a big team anything can be expensive. That would be like implying laptops cost $20k, because you bought for a whole department. This shit is expensive, but not THAT expensive. Support is like a grand for lessons, $150-300/hr. However, these are very normal rates for any engineering labor.

DoingIsLearning 3y ago

> If you work in the embedded space for a large OEM, ODM, or integration house > Containers? 30+ years at this with 10 major contracts with big companies (and dozens of smaller ones) and I've only seen one company use containers and that was for virtual prototyping. There are _a_lot_ of small and medium size businesses working with embedded devices with limited on-site resources, and those will usually use external contractors. In that case containers are very useful to share an Automated Test environment. The alternative is a long back and forth or spending time on-site supporting teams with wildly varying skill levels. Also as someone else mentioned when an old client asks for a new feature, the ability to take a snapshot in time is a huge time saver, rather than trying to replicate that build environment from scratch.

demondemidi 3y ago
I'm highly skeptical of the benefits of containers in the embedded space. The inertia required to set them up and maintain them, and train customers to use them is massive. I'm sure some people benefit somewhere, but in my experience people want a zip file of your code base, platform support package version, and compiler version, ... that's 99% of it. Working with ARC/MSP430/ATMEL/PIC/Cortex-M devices for decades I have rarely seen a codebase over 10 megabytes of customer C code.

P_I_Staker 3y ago

A million dollars?!?!? I think we pay like $60-150k per head. That doesn't all go to one company. Perhaps if you have a 20+ person team it's possible that a supplier charges "a cool mil", but I'm pretty skeptical. If you have a big team anything can be expensive. That would be like implying laptops cost $20k, because you bought for a whole department. This shit is expensive, but not THAT expensive. Support is like a grand for lessons, $150-300/hr. However, these are very normal rates for any engineering labor.