It's difficult enough getting many embedded engineers to go to C over assembly. In the ARM world, C is the standard for programming, but for lots of other devic

It's difficult enough getting many embedded engineers to go to C over assembly. In the ARM world, C is the standard for programming, but for lots of other devices, such as the MSP430, efficiency and deterministic behaviour is really important. Flash and SRAM sizes are very small in some cases and Java would simply be impossible. For bigger devices, RTOS's and C work pretty well, but you can't be liberal code wise given the amount of clocks available. And you conserve those as a necessity usually. For networked devices, where you don't care so much about power or battery drain, then I guess there's an argument to be had. NXP LPC43xx with its dual processor m4 and m0 running at 204mHz for example could just about manage it. But for devices doing work like data acquisition most designers would balk at the idea. Especially as regards memory allocation.