[melony]

Step #1 - Strong arm the business and hardware team into putting a ton of ram on said embedded device together with a relatively up to date SoC ARM core

Step #2 - Run Linux on it (preferably with in-tree drivers)

Step #3 - Application development is now Somebody Else's Problem

On a serious note, unless your power envelope is tiny or you have hard real-time constraints, you really shouldn't be pushing small microcontrollers to the limit and running custom networking stacks on those. That's a security disaster. Don't connect things to the internet if you don't have a reliable way of updating the firmware.