Comment by LarsKrimi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LarsKrimi | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Zephyr is a baby project. From the embedded devs I know they have only started seriously considering Zephyr in the last 2-3 years for commercial projects.

And you may call it inertia sure, but in the mid 2000's everyone was doing their own hardware abstraction. You had to get books and stuff because documentation sucked. MCU vendors seemingly made a point of making especially stuff like ADCs and timers very hard to abstract away between vendors.

Back then you had a choice of GCC/IAR/KEIL/CCS/Codwarrior and probably more. Each worse and less standards-compliant than the next, except for GCC/avr-gcc as was the key enabler of Arduino

All that text to say: The situation was different, and Arduino showed that there's a wider unmet demand for custom embedded stuff and that people will sacrifice a bit of performance for something that's easy to develop

"People will sacrifice a bit of performance" was also enabled by all the MCU advances.

Those bytes of memory really mattered when 512B was all the RAM you'll ever get. Nowadays, you can buy a RTOS capable 32-bit MCU for $0.20. Why count bytes when you can just... not?

> Why count bytes when you can just... not?

The amount of memory used defines the size of the state space of the system — with exponential growth in the number of representable states. The amount of testing needed to have confidence in the behavior of a system grows (and I’d state based on experience, but without proof, grows faster than logarithmically) with the size of the state space. Building smaller, simpler systems is still the key to being able to realistically test and define behavior at high confidence levels, regardless of the price of a bit.

I fail to think of many cases where such an approach would be warranted at all.

>> Zephyr is a baby project

Most white box appliance makers use zephyr, so do some popular Wifi camera systems, and every major embedded SOC/MCU maker supports it. If that's a baby project, why don't you tell me what a "mature" project is?

> Most white box appliance makers use zephyr

Most? Like who? Looking at Zephyr's member page it's just chip vendors

Can't say, and you're not obliged to believe me. The vendors are just the companies supporting it. Companies that use it aren't going to announce it. Think about it: if it is just vendors on the site that would mean nobody is using it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com