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They still exist in the US, they are working "embedded" now. Embedded has made a huge jump in the last 15 years from custom OSes or no-OS to now COTS RTOSes/Linux. Even the embedded guys lament the newer guys can't debug an ISR anymore...

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I'm an embedded developer myself and while the original article is aimed at game development it is just as valid for embedded development.

I've come across many situations where saving a few extra bytes of RAM here and there and saving a few instructions during an interrupt routine have been vital.

It's even valid at much higher levels, sometimes. Hadoop gives you high levels of abstraction, but you can still get major performance gains with small adjustments to file formats.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/mapwritable_sometimes...

I wonder if the popularity of the Arduino will make this kind of knowledge more mainstream? Certainly coding with 2.5k of RAM is very different from writing things for desktops or even smartphones.

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