"Strange. "Many years ago" I coded for EPROM as well, and weirdly, it was the corss-compiler vendors that were slow to offer C++, while I was constantly bugging them about it. This is kind of interesting, since you apparently knew embedded systems programmers that didn't want C++. Perhaps they were really hardware engineers who soft of evolved into doing software, and even the concept of using C and not assembler was very experimental in their minds."
Ha Ha - spot on! I learned a lot from working with them though. Very bizarre to meet people who can do mental arithmetic in hex as well. Racing car engineers are a strange bunch at the best of times and all a bit obsessed - you should see the things they did to their casings - drilling away all material they considered excess. Great place to work though.
"Even though stuff like dynamic allocation was irrelevant at the time, I sure could have used the syntactical, organizational help that C++ offers, when doing those 128KB - 512KB ROMs. I think that paradoxically, it was because I was so size and speed conscious, that I was in tune with what the compilers were generating, that I realized that using C++ would have been a great design-time convenience, whithout imposing run-time cost. "
And this was indeed my argument too :-)
"No, I disagree with you here. C++ is not "marginally slower than C;". But that statement is of course quite vague "
I was simply making a concesion to the fact that C++ occasionally has the odd extra pointer de-reference which in some peoples minds that slows it down. You are indeed correct though - by the time its been optimised etc. it makes no difference at all.
"But for most practical purposes, C++ is the same as C as far as run-time performance is concerned. At least, from a theoretical point of view, this _must_ be true - both C and C++ are compiled, statically typed, languages. Maybe some computer science graduate could verify or refute this conjecture."
Not sure how you would go about proving it but my (many) years of experience
bears this out.
cheers
mark