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by koffiezet 3033 days ago
Psychological ones? No, simply the lack of available reliable compilers for some platforms was my problem. I developed POS applications, where C++ would have worked fine, if we had a decent C++ compiler on every platform we wanted to support. Some platforms used GCC, but most used proprietary compilers - where C++ support was completely absent or very scetchy. When you can't use exceptions, the memory allocator is absolute garbage and leaks stuff on it's own and encounter various random compiler bugs, you quickly decide to stick with plain old C. C++ in my experience was an absolute mess when it came to embedded work (note that the last embedded work I did dates back from 2006, so not sure what the current situation is)

Also, C++ uses a lot more memory, which can also be a no-go when you get as little as 32kb for code+data, luckily with in-place execution.

2 comments

> Also, C++ uses a lot more memory...

Depends on how you use it. "If you don't use it, you don't pay for it" is the C++ philosophy. If you use it as "C with objects", it should use no more memory than C with structs. If you use it as "C with polymorphism", it should use no more memory than C with function pointers.

Modern C++ does just fine on a Commodore C64.

CppCon 2016: Jason Turner “Rich Code for Tiny Computers: A Simple Commodore 64 Game in C++17”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkNBP00wJE

Sad that it took C++ almost 40 years to get there.
I was doing C++ development on MS-DOS already in the 90's.

Never cared for C beyond using it in Turbo C 2.0 for MS-DOS, and later when required to use it for university projects and client projects that explicitly required ANSI C89.

So it wasn't 64 KB, but it was perfectly usable on 640 KB systems.

The main problem has always been fighting misconceptions.