Thread: Decision Making

Originally Posted by Elysia

Unfortunately not so in embedded systems where every KByte counts.

I disagree. I can't speak about VC++, but G++ gives the option to exclude all built-in declarations/implementations, via the -fno-builtin command line option, and there are other options to strip it down even further, so that the only code that gets built is the code you write. in fact, the GCC family goes so far as to give the ability to create a flat, plain binary file, of the type you'd burn into a ROM chip. I'm sure VC++ and Intel's C++ compiler offer similar options, but I have no experience in trying to do that with those two compilers.

Originally Posted by Elysia

Just adding iostream adds a lot of kbytes, you know? Which might be too expensive.
But actually, I did not know of this option. This will certainly come in handy, so thanks for that.

I get your point, but the same could be said of including the C standard library in an embedded system. in my experience, it's much more common to implement your own iostream/stdio library that contains no more than the minimum functionality required for a given embedded system. including the whole standard library, whether it's C or C++, is probably the wrong thing to do for embedded programming.

It is important to note though that much of the C standard (excepting the language grammar basically), including the libraries and main() and other things, only apply to hosted environments. Since embedded programming is frequently not on a hosted environment rolling your own I/O functions may be mandatory.

Of course, good hardware has something to the effect of a library, usually.