[ChuckNorris89]

>Seems to miss the part where it's ok to create terrible software in embedded

As opposed to the absolute perfection that is modern web, enterprise and mobile SW?

>But it's all fine as it shaves a few cents from the BOM.

Every engineering job, including SW development, works to reduce material costs and automate away other jobs. Why do you feel embedded development is somehow worse here?

[kierank]

Embedded development is substantially worse when it comes to out of tree unmaintainable kernel patches, compiler forks, binary blobs around terrible hardware etc etc.

Completely incomparable to web, enterprise and mobile (android and co is a part of the embedded trashfire of course). They all have their problems but are minor league compared to embedded development hell.

Embedded development takes BoM reduction to the extreme and piles all the technical debt onto software.

[ChuckNorris89]

Binary blobs you say? How about how our entire lives are ruined by having to use garbage apps like Teams every day or any other multitude of garbage websites on a daily baiss ?

Did you actually work in the embedded industry, or are you just venting on some bad experiences you had with some boards/phones?

You know, embedded is more than r-pi clones and android devices, right? It's auomotive, aerospace, industrial automation, healthcare, etc.

I cannot overestimate how mistaken you are but you seem to be already set in your ways, and have a bone to pick so I'll leave the conversation here to save my sanity as you can't be reasoned with nor is anyone's time worth it to convince you otherwise.

[kierank]

Unfortunately the industry I am in (multimedia) is slowly getting invaded by all the awful embedded development practices, binary blobs, custom forks, hacks galore. It's ruining an area where there was clean code, no blobs.

Also Linus' ARM rant for good measure: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/15/133

And imagine the stuff they didn't upstream...I'm sure that's part of some magic SDK that only works on one version of glibc and kernel.

[aidenn0]

I remember people hacking on the binary of the MS mpeg4 encoder to create "DivX" binary blobs are everywhere (though much less so in every industry than they were 30 years ago)

[MrBuddyCasino]

what is the „multimedia“ industry, and does it run along the data highway?

[joezydeco]

I think it involves CD-ROMs

[aidenn0]

> android and co is a part of the embedded trashfire of course

I don't consider e.g. Android phones to be embedded. A smartphone is much more like a small laptop. That being said, there is a sliding scale; e.g. car infotainment systems have properties of both embedded and non-embedded software.

[joezydeco]

I wake up smiling every morning that I don't have to worry if some npm fuckup is going to blow up my project or disable it in production.

The grass isn't greener on the other side of the fence.

[Palomides]

embedded hardware has much simpler cost calculations than web, it's pretty easy to come up with an out the door unit cost for hardware, while a web service might not even have any coherent idea of a unit sold, let alone what it costs before there are users

and a simple number is a very easy bludgeon to wield in discussions about engineering choices