Those stacks can be full of 'not invented here'. They are unique and have their own quirks. Quirks that you more than likely can not google for any sort of guidance as to what is going on. I wrote one of those stacks a few years ago. No std libs at all. Why? must fit in 32k and most of that space is needed to hold data. That means throwing a lot of those helper bits out or spend weeks figuring out how to bend the compiler to your will and not include everything. When it is easier just to roll your on CS version of whatever. But it sucks because you probably have odd edge cases.
Yeh it's a rough but rewarding life; I spend most of my hours on problems that aren't on Google, or any LLM, so I'm kinda used to it now. (Stockholm)
Would love to know of more spaces which require this level of programming - usually I feel kinda underworked at most shops.
Though, true enlightenment is combining the urge to NIH with some, light, sensible borrowing from those smarter than us :) very much a key skill unto itself.
Embedded programming is this 99% of the time. Abstracting hardware away is a silly notion. Docker? Cloud? Hard to do when your code only runs
at all on one specific custom board. The protocol you wrote to talk to that one chip isn't working? Time to break out the oscilloscope and look at the actual data going to the pins.
Join us, the pay is worse and the work is harder, but also the prestige is lower.
I sometimes really miss embedded programming; it felt like real engineering in a way that higher-level software development often doesn't. Alas, the shop I worked for could not keep me busy enough, the projects began to feel repetitive, and I got really bored; it'd be hard to go back.
The space I was in was IoT type items. Usually hub controllers. The thing is that is getting less and less as you can get a fairly robust thing now with a couple hundred meg of flash and ram for a very reasonable price. So those 'must fit in 32k' items are few and far between these days. With that sort of space you may as well use the proper libs that are usually nicely documented and all the quirks have been seen by hundreds of other poor souls such as yourself.
