[jacquesm]

I think this is possibly one area where functional programming could shine if the garbage collection issue could be dealt with once and for all (and that's a hard one). It's for practical reasons impossible to test something with that much state exhaustively, but once broken up into functional units you just might get there. Something along the lines of Erlang for embedded systems.

[mattmcknight]

No. Functional programming does not magically free you from "state". The world has state, the unlimited number of real world inputs are the state of the program, merely expressed as function parameters. The CPU itself has registers, and stores a call stack.

The abstraction of functional programming does not alleviate all of these issues, and can introduce other ones.

[jacquesm]

Of course it doesn't free you from state. But it can help to put the state into a more manageable context. Just like side-effect free functions can help you with that.

I've done enough embedded programming (and repairs on embedded programming projects) to know just how bad the spaghetti can get and it really wouldn't hurt to borrow a few leaves from the functional world in those cases.