[mikekchar]

It's more difficult. I used C++ in many projects for years and enjoyed working with it. You have to be very disciplined, though, and you need to know a lot about how it works under the hood to get it to play nicely, but it has it's niche. Embedded is not it's niche IMHO (and I've also done embedded, where we specifically chose to use C over C++).

Really, whenever you are doing any kind of embedded or real time project you are basically doing "resource limited development". The resource can be memory, I/O, CPU or any and all of that (or more). You need to be able to control exactly how it's used. C++ is often used to abstract you away from those things -- which is exactly the opposite of what you want.

C is a high-ish level language that is close enough to the metal that you can fairly easily understand the implications of what you are doing. C++ is not and it's incredibly easy to build a monstrocity that chews memory -- not just working memory, but application size too. Even dealing with name mangling is a surprising PITA when you are dealing with embedded -- remember embedded means you often have to build your own tools because nobody else is using your platform ;-).

Like I said, I actually like C++ (or at least C++ of a couple of decades ago -- the language seems to have changed a lot since I last used it, so it's hard for me to say). There are a lot of times where I simply don't care about controlling resources to that level. These days there are a lot of other choices and I'm not sure that I would ever choose C++ for a project again, but definitely back in the day it was something I reached for quite a bit.

WRT Rust, I agree with the OP that the borrow checker is really nice. I recently spent some time playing with Rust to see how easy it was to implement higher level abstractions. One of the things I was really impressed with was how hard Rust slaps you when you try to do something that would explode your memory footprint. It still feels a bit immature to me, but it has tremendous promise (and if you don't mind working around the immaturity, it's probably fine to use at the moment).