Embedded software technology appears to lag behind&#151it’s often a little late picking up on new trends and fashions. That’s largely because embedded developers have a cautious, conservative attitude, which is borne out of years of experience contending with limited resources: memory that can’t be treated as unlimited and CPUs that are powerful enough, but only just.

Embedded guys were slow to pick up on high-level languages years ago, but eventually C became accepted. It took the arrival of very high quality code generation and transparent debugging for the industry to accept such new-fangled ideas, and that was only under the relentless pressure to become more productive. The obvious step on from C is C++. Even though its use for embedded software has steadily increased in recent years, it is far from universal. Why is that?

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