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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>Today you load the boiler library and type start().

Not when you have safety critical real time applications that need to be certified.

Gas boiler control isn't move fast and break things web development. Unless you want to blow yourself up.

That's why old AVR solutions are still used. They've been certified once, they work just fine for this purpose even on newer products. So you go with it. It's a slow moving industry for this reason.

Also, embedded dev is way more than writing C or python code and how many "bits" your CPU core has. You need to take into account clocking sources and stability, analog and digital I/O, on package voltage regulators, tolerance to glitching and brownouts, etc. and for certain applications, AVR chips are way more robust than newer ARM or RISC-V shiny.

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I don’t want to go too much into C vs Rust but loads of C code out there, when it comes time to manipulate strings or do something a bit complicated, ends up a hacky mess.

For all the implications you are making about “move fast and break things” in web dev, at least newer tech stacks makes it easier to not completely break your data structures cuz the abstraction ceiling made doing things the right way hard.

Of course experienced C programmers “get it”, design their code in a way to avoid these pitfalls, and can right performant, correct code. I just think that it’s easier with a lot of other tools for stuff that’s just a bit complicated

I feel you're mixing things up. Not every embedded application requires parsing strings or JSONs like you do with web frameworks.

AVRs and 8 bit chips in general are mostly used in various fixed point numerical control applications like CNC, industrial automation, elevator control, and white goods for the home like washing machines, HVAC, and microwave ovens, so for that they're perfect and so is C.

All they do is read some buttons and sensors, crunch some basic math, run a state machine, and turn some motors, LEDs and relays ON and OFF. That's it.

Complex string manipulations is something you'll never see on an AVR chip in such production applications.

Fixed point is a perfect example of an abstraction ceiling that makes it unnecessarily hard to do the right thing.

At first it's fine, but then you'll want to do some filtering, and then some coefficient buckets will start to overflow, and then you'll start tracking exponents, and before you know it you've sunk engineer months or years into an ugly, buggy, underpowered reinvention of floating point numbers.

I've shipped safety critical motor control embedded software that runs flawlessly on thousands of cars using only fixed point math without it being ugly, buggy or underpowered, precisely because everything was computed only in fixed point fractional math.

You're just making up FUD.

"It was good enough for me, so it should be good enough for everybody."

Lol.

Seems like you didn't need fixed point in the first place. It's for when you need guarantees.

I've worked on dozens of embedded projects that don't need string manipulation. Or just outputting some log string through a serial port, which is removed in release.

Why do you think you'll need to process input strings?

> just a bit complicated

Like what? Most embedded projects don't use concurrency, or even dynamic allocations. Not every projects is a hackable bluetooth/wifi stack, that you need Rust otherwise [insert favourite exploit FUD here]. It can be as simple as a toothbrush with two buttons and a motor.

I’m just talking about business logic and data structures. It seems fine to want to not have bugs in principle!

Though to your point when we’re talking about 8-bit microprocessors the amount of complications that could even be placed. I just feel like it’s totally normal to feel lacking when writing/reading certain kinds of code in C.

> business logic and data structures. It seems fine to want to not have bugs in principle!

I think there is no (embedded) language so far which prevents you from having bugs in business logic.

Those Python programmers scared of learning C, can also use certified Pascal and BASIC compilers then.

https://www.mikroe.com/mikropascal

https://www.mikroe.com/mikrobasic

Agreed, I was illustrating what Python programming looks like to me. Having experience in embedded C, I see Python as a templating language at best, and it's obviously not something you'd use for critical systems. Every time I use Python I end up rewriting libraries in C.

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