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Comment by dkarapetyan | Hacker News Reader

Funny you should say that because his team was hired to develop all the tools and IDEs for Siemens and their industrial systems. The tools you see on that page were developed jointly by the BMW embedded development team and I think a few government agencies. So I'm a little puzzled by your comment and your reaction to an obviously better way of developing correct and verified software using C.

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Name dropping does not mean a thing and I doubt they developed ALL the tools and IDEs for Siemens' industrial systems. If they did, then they would be wise not to mention the numerous SCADA faults found in Siemens control systems. There is absolutely no way you would roll out a system like that and have every industrial product line using it. So I am little puzzled by your claim.

The thing about these systems is they attempt to prevent you from shooting your own foot by not letting you aim. Some operations (such as erasing and writing flash) require you to do dangerous things like relocating code to SRAM and running from there while your flash operation completes. The details of each platform vary: ARM code is generated in a position dependent fashion; MSP430 is not.

I am certainly not calling C the end-all be all, but it's a tough system to beat. You could convince managers that mbedder may be the way to go, but it would be an absolute boondoggle to get existing engineers to use it. (They couldn't even convince the Park-o-matic folks to rewrite their code to use it). To a "C simpleton" like me, I would not call mbedder obviously better.

I think you fear learning something new more than anything else and calling yourself a C simpleton doesn't really help your argument. Like I said in another comment when assemblers were being developed the same exact arguments were thrown around so if history is a guide then these tools are the future and the sooner you learn them the better position you'll be in.

You're as judgmental as errordeveloper; let me do the namedropping this time. I have timestamped when I started playing with certain technologies:

SVG: 2001 AJAX/Javascript: 2002 Windows CE: 2005 DirectFB: 2005 FLTK: 2006 SCons: 2007

I have been learning new things my entire career. I have wasted tons of time trying to support the "better" technology. mbedder presents a very weak case in my mind.

My question to you is how has your experience with mbedder been so far? You seem to understand its superiority. Does the code size and RAM consumption live up to your expectations?

You don't have to prove anything to me but your reaction is not rational. I don't think anyone will argue that a tool that integrates unit testing and model checking into a coherent experience is an overall win. As for code size and other matters it depends on your use-case and in this day and age I think a few MBs here and there is not going to make or break an embedded product offering especially if whoever is making that product can deliver it with less bugs.

> As for code size and other matters it depends on your use-case and in this day and age I think a few MBs here and there is not going to make or break an embedded product offering especially if whoever is making that product can deliver it with less bugs.

This statement alone disqualifies you from making any comment about embedded development and automotive embedded development in particular.

Agree

You just keep sounding that way, which doesn't neccesarly means you are that bad. It's just how you came across with your original comment ;)

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