On Jul 1, 2007, at 11:45 AM, Peter Bindels wrote:

> People use C because they have code in C...

I don't think your argument hold up very well.  Wasn't the original
Apple OS written in pascal?  Wasn't ADA going to be required for all
government-funded projects?  Was not PL/1 going to be THE language
for anything IBM?  I don't recall C being heavily used in embedded
projects 20 years ago; I recall it being barely available for computers
as large as the IBM/PC of the day.

I think C succeeded because it was one of the few languages that
didn't include a library or run-time environment specification
that was too big for embedded systems; it was easy to SHRINK.
Eventually there were standards for C libraries, but that came
LATER...

I think you'd have a really hard time finding a set of C++
libraries and run-time environment that will work in the 4k
memory environment of even relatively large 8 to 16 bit micros.
It's pretty questionable for the single-chip ARMs with 64k or
less.  Our "embedded" systems allocate at 4k to 8k for each
process or interrupt level stack (3 or 4 times that on RISC
cpus, cause of the the potentially heftier context saving),
and that's still for C.  We have relatively frequent arguments
about C++, with the nay-sayers harping on just how easy it is
to suddenly use up much more of one resource or another than
you thought you were using.  To use C++ on a mid-sized
microcontroller, you'd probably end up needing to restrict
yourself to a subset of features and classes that not many
people would still consider to be C++...

(How's that defined embedded subset/version of java that Sun
was pushing (javame?)?  A little searching shows Sun bragging
that their CLDC JavaME implementation is targeted to devices
with "as little as 192KB of total available memory", and that
their javaSE for embedded systems has a reduced footprint of
"only 30MB."  That doesn't make ME feel very warm and fuzzy.)

BillW

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