The illusion of apparent simplicity

The illusion of apparent simplicity

I'm reminded of this Bryan Cantrill quote:

When developing for embedded systems — and especially for the flotilla of microcontrollers that surround a host CPU on the kinds of servers we’re building at Oxide — memory use is critical. Historically, C has been the best fit for these applications just because it so lean: by providing essentially nothing other than the portable assembler that is the language itself, it avoids the implicit assumptions (and girth) of a complicated runtime. But the nothing that C provides reflects history more than minimalism; it is not an elegant nothing, but rather an ill-considered nothing that leaves those who build embedded systems building effectively everything themselves — and in a language that does little to help them write correct software.

-- http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2020/10/11/rust-after-the-honeymoon/