[ryandrake]

Embedded aside, there’s never been a better time to get into C++ programming. The bad old days of the Visual C++ 6 hegemony are over. There is finally good compiler competition. They are no longer stagnant and are supporting more and more features with every release.

Things like smart pointers, move semantics, lambdas, type inference are great additions and can save you from the footguns of the past. And that’s just C++11. The documentation and learning resources on the web have never been better, too.

The problem, as you point out, is on the embedded side, specifically vendor support. There doesn’t seem to be a solution to vendors who don’t give a shit. They scrape together an old build of g++, manage to barely get it to work, and call it a day. There’s probably some “disruption” opportunity here, and someone smarter than me will see it. I think Apple has actually set a great example of how it could/should work. Getting Hello World running on a production, end-user iPhone is 10x easier than getting it working with CrappyChineseVendor’s SuperDeluxe BSP and reference hardware, whose only purpose is to support software development. And Apple’s toolchain is reasonably up to date and gets yearly updates vs the other embedded toolchains which are 5 years old and never get touched post-sale. That should be totally unacceptable but we still hand our money over to these vendors.