[jwmullally]

To back up your point, this was a great blog post on the fatal consequences of failure in mission-critical car software: http://embeddedgurus.com/state-space/2014/02/are-we-shooting...

After reading one may think: Why the fuck is there any dynamic memory allocation (stack) going on there? Why isn't the car software implemented as one big pre-allocated hierarchical state machine? You wouldn't expect such execution dynamism in hard circuits or even FPGAs. But in any case I think non-deterministic systems (especially complex CPUs+programs) should be outlawed for such mission critical signal paths.

[ArkyBeagle]

You got me as to why this is considered remotely acceptable. This being said, you sort-of need a stack for a context switch ( or possibly an ISR ) in many RTOS offerings.

This also being said, I've had engineers react rather violently to the very concept of FSMs. I can't say why that is.