Seems to miss the part where it's ok to create terrible software in embedded, with custom forks of everything, binary blobs galore. But it's all fine as it shaves a few cents from the BOM.
As opposed to the absolute perfection that is modern web, enterprise and mobile SW?
>But it's all fine as it shaves a few cents from the BOM.
Every engineering job, including SW development, works to reduce material costs and automate away other jobs. Why do you feel embedded development is somehow worse here?
Completely incomparable to web, enterprise and mobile (android and co is a part of the embedded trashfire of course). They all have their problems but are minor league compared to embedded development hell.
Embedded development takes BoM reduction to the extreme and piles all the technical debt onto software.
Did you actually work in the embedded industry, or are you just venting on some bad experiences you had with some boards/phones?
You know, embedded is more than r-pi clones and android devices, right? It's auomotive, aerospace, industrial automation, healthcare, etc.
I cannot overestimate how mistaken you are but you seem to be already set in your ways, and have a bone to pick so I'll leave the conversation here to save my sanity as you can't be reasoned with nor is anyone's time worth it to convince you otherwise.
Also Linus' ARM rant for good measure: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/15/133
And imagine the stuff they didn't upstream...I'm sure that's part of some magic SDK that only works on one version of glibc and kernel.
The grass isn't greener on the other side of the fence.
I don't consider e.g. Android phones to be embedded. A smartphone is much more like a small laptop. That being said, there is a sliding scale; e.g. car infotainment systems have properties of both embedded and non-embedded software.
and a simple number is a very easy bludgeon to wield in discussions about engineering choices
For me my plan is to use Zephyr with RP2040.
I've been using Zephyr on an Atmel/Microchip SAMD21 for $WORK and it's been awesome.
I have an RP2040 sitting on my desk for a personal project and the plan was to use Zephyr for that as well, but it seems the WiFi is based around a binary blob and a weird interface to it that the Arduino BSP has wrappers for... It's been crunch time at work and I haven't gone back yet to see if the RP2040 port is coming along further, but on the Saturday I was looking at it, it seemed like connectivity was potentially going to be an issue for now.
ESP32 support is currently great for some chips and a WIP for other chips. I got unlucky and the one board I planned to use for a different project was pretty much completely unsupported, but I found a different one in my parts bin that only took about 4 hours to get going with the sensors I had planned on using (I2C or SPI, I don't recall), Bluetooth Central for some different sensors, and WiFi to connect it to the local network. It was really smooth!