Fantastic exchange from DConf

[Patrick Schluter via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 10 May 2017 at 11:16:57 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
[...]
>
> The likelihood of a randomly picked C/C++ programmer not even 
> knowing what a profiler is, much less having used one, is 
> extremely high in my experience. I worked with a lot of 
> embedded C programmers with several years of experience who 
> knew nothing but embedded C. We're talking dozens of people 
> here. Not one of them had ever used a profiler.

I've worked 10 years in embedded (industry, time acquisition and 
network gears) and I can say that there is a good reason to that. 
It's nearly impossible to profile in an embedded system (nowadays 
it's often possible because of the generalization of Linux and 
gnu tools but at that time it wasn't). The tools don't exist or 
if they do, the instrumentation breaks the constraints of the 
controller. This was also one of the reason we chose our embedded 
CPU's very carefully. We always chose processors for which there 
existed mainstream desktop versions so that we could at least use 
the confortable tooling to test some parts of the code on a nice 
environment. We used Z80 (CP/M), 80186 (MS-C on DOS) and then 
68030 (Pure-C on Atari TT).

TL;DR profiling for embedded is order of magnitudes harder than 
for nice OS environments.