On Friday, 2 March 2018 at 10:21:05 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
[…]
There are those who use C because the only other option is
assembly language, so they make the right decision. This is an
indicator that high-level language toolchain manufacturers have
failed to port to their platform. I'll wager there are still a
lot of 8051s out there. I'll also wager the C++ compilers for
that target do not realise C++, but a subset that is worse than
using C. Even after 14 years of improvement.
It is going to be interesting what happens when Rust begins to
have to toolchains to deal with microcontrollers. Hopefully
though ARM cores dominate now, especially given the silicon
area is reputedly smaller than 8051. I've been out of the
smartcard arena for over a decade now, and yet I bet it is all
still very much the same.
There are safer alternatives, (Pascal and Basic), but they suffer
from the same stigma that has pushed them outside of the market,
namely they aren't offered on the chip vendor SDK, thus requiring
an additional purchase, which only a few bother with.
http://turbo51.com/
https://www.mikroe.com/compilers
