22 May
2020
22 May
'20
8:59 p.m.
On 2020-05-22 7:09 AM, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Having to get a paid consultant doesn't exactly argue for the idea that
C compilers were "easy" - plus it's almost a decade after the period of
high growth. So this doesn't seem strong support for the thesis quoted
by OP.
--Toby
Tyler Adams <coppero1237(a)gmail.com> wrote:
To my recollection, in 1985 C wasn't firstly considered an embedded
language; it was considered an applications language (so was assembly,
but we could say that was tapering off).
I believe the explosion in popularity was due to that lesson from Unix,
that you could have a single portable language for both "system" code
and applications code, with a modern looking syntax, that could be self
hosted and compiled to reasonably efficient machine code.
All those tradeoffs and definitions are very different 40 years later,
of course. (And C was far from the first or only language that met those
criteria before 1975. It just happened to take off.)
So, now Im curious about embedded systems. In my
limited experience, every
"embedded system" I programmed for from 2002-2011 had C as its primary
language. After 2011, I stopped programming embedded systems, so I don't
know after that. Why was C so dominant in this space?
First of all, because C is the (almost) perfect language for embedded
systems - tight code generated, language close to the metal, etc. etc. Is it because adding
a backend to gcc was free, C was already well known, and C was sufficiently
performant?
Cygnus Solutions (Hi John!) had a lot to do with this. They specialized
in porting GCC to different processors used in embedded systems and
provided support.
Arnold