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CS201 - Introduction to Programming - GDB 1st - Spring 2012

GDB - 1
For developing software for embedded systems, C/C++ is an optimal choice. Yes or NO? Support your answer with solid reasons
Solution:
C++ is still useful in embedded systems. As everyone else has said, that it still depends on the system itself, like 8-bit uC would probably be a no-no in my book even though there is a compiler out there and some people do it(shudder). [ There's still an advantage to using C++ even when you scale it down to something like "C+" even in a 8-bit micro world. What I mean by "C+", I mean don't use new/delete, avoid exceptions, avoid virtual classes with inheritance, possibly avoid inheritance all together, be very careful with templates, use inline functions instead of macros, and use const variables instead of #defines. I've been working both in C and C++ in embedded systems for well over a decade now, and some of my youthful enthusiasm for C++ has definitely worn off due to some real world problems that shake one's naivete. I have seen the worst of C++ in an embedded systems which I would like to refer to as "CS programmers gone wild in an EE world." In fact, that is something I'm working on with my client to improve this one codebase they have among others. The danger of C++ is because it's a very very powerful tool much like a two-edged sword that can cut both your arm and leg off if not educated and disciplined properly in it's language and general programming itself. C is more like a single-edged sword, but still just as sharp. With C++ it's too easy to get very high-levels of abstraction and create obfuscated interfaces that become meaningless in the long-term, and that's partly due to C++ flexibility in solving the same problem with many different language features(templates, OOP, procedural, RTTI, OOP+templates, overloading, inlining). I finished a two 4-hour seminars on Embedded Software in C++ by the C++ guru, Scott Meyers. He pointed out some things about templates that I never considered before and how much more they can help creating safety-critical code. The jist of it is, you can't have dead code in software that has to meet stringent safety-critical code requirements. Templates can help you accomplish this, since the compiler only creates the code it needs when instantiating templates.

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do nothing but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

In other words: the choice of C is the only sane choice. I know Miles Bader jokingly said "to piss you off", but it's actually true. I've come to the conclusion that any programmer that would prefer the project to be in C++ over C is likely a programmer that I really would prefer to piss off, so that he doesn't come and screw up any project I'm involved with.

C++ leads to really really bad design choices. You invariably start using the "nice" library features of the language like STL and Boost and other total and utter crap

familiarity
desired language features
specific libraries you want to use
performance requirements

For server side programming you can often choose from a myriad of different languages, compiled or interpreted. Usually the choice of language is driven by which platform you or your team will be most effective on. Or if you don't yet have a team, the availability of skills in the market.

On a side note I don't really understand deciding to use C/C++ based on performance (only) since many scripting languages are extensible with C/C++. You get the benefit of a rapid development language coupled with the ability to migrate the slow portions into C/C++ extensions. Certainly if your doing systems programming where every op counts it's understandable, but in most app development I don't get it.

++ has an arsenal of utilities from long ago, running in many platforms. But it is painful to start walking through streams for just passing String to Integer and reverse.

C++ on the other hand, has an awful deal with dependencies on libraries. Once you compile something in GCC X or VC++ Y, then you can't rely that the code will run by the next version of those tools. The same hell is on Windows, the same hell is on Unix too.

Perl, takes its power from Unix world but especially as a regular expression tool. This is what it is used most of the time. Along with some pretty serious tools that even Java can't do it in a normal way (check out how to upload a file to a web server), Perl is "just do it".

Python is easy, flexible and a dynamic language. So easy that you can send an integer to a function, the script expects string, yet you can have a result! Unexpected though, but a result. So it the programmer needs to be very cautious. IDLE offers some debugging, but when you have TELNET'ed to a system, or SSH'ed in three levels down and you want to find your problem, the debugger won't be there to stand next to you. But, it can do some great math work fast.