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by kierank 1132 days ago
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.

3 comments

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.

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.

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)
what is the „multimedia“ industry, and does it run along the data highway?
I think it involves CD-ROMs
> 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.

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.