[LeifCarrotson]

I don't think that article is particularly outdated. The subsequent development of and cost drops for ARM Cortex-M processors has changed the scene a bit - but they had ARM V7 TDMI units then which were comparable.

But at no time has UML tooling been the driving factor behind the industry's adoption or lack of adoption of a language.

The problem with C++ and other high-level languages has always been that it's hard to see how much a line of code costs. Incrementing a pointer to an array in C has a transparent, short runtime, compared to moving to the next element in a C++ collection which may accidentally invoke a dizzying indecipherable mess of template objects, overloaded operators, and STL dependencies. Or in other languages, you may need a large operating system and runtime to be loaded.

High level languages do handy magic things for you under the hood. If your engine bay is measured in terabytes of storage, gigabytes of RAM, gigaflops of computational power, hundreds of watts of electrical​ power, and seconds of acceptable interaction time, those magic things that let programmers build useful features faster are nice.

But when you're trying to get guaranteed responses in microseconds from milliwatts of electrical power in a few kilobytes of RAM, you're likely going to be hand-picking everything under the hood. No magic allowed.