Re:What? More 8-Bit Microcontrollers?
by jjoonathan on Friday July 01, 2022 @04:32PM
(#31952430)
Fixed point is a perfect example of an abstraction ceiling that makes it unnecessarily hard to do the right thing.
At first it's fine, but then you'll want to do some filtering, and then some coefficient buckets will start to overflow, and then you'll start tracking exponents, and before you know it you've sunk engineer months or years into an ugly, buggy, underpowered reinvention of floating point numbers.
Re:What? More 8-Bit Microcontrollers?
by ChuckNorris89 on Saturday July 02, 2022 @09:31AM
(#31958825)
I've shipped safety critical motor control embedded software that runs flawlessly on thousands of cars using only fixed point math without it being ugly, buggy or underpowered, precisely because everything was computed only in fixed point fractional math.
You're just making up FUD.
Re:What? More 8-Bit Microcontrollers?
by jjoonathan on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @11:29AM
(#31989372)
"It was good enough for me, so it should be good enough for everybody."
Lol.
Re:What? More 8-Bit Microcontrollers?
by otter-rock on Saturday July 02, 2022 @04:55PM
(#31962308)
Seems like you didn't need fixed point in the first place. It's for when you need guarantees.
AVRs and 8 bit chips in general are mostly used in various fixed point numerical control applications like CNC, industrial automation, elevator control, and white goods for the home like washing machines, HVAC, and microwave ovens, so for that they're perfect and so is C.
All they do is read some buttons and sensors, crunch some basic math, run a state machine, and turn some motors, LEDs and relays ON and OFF. That's it.
Complex string manipulations is something you'll never see on an AVR chip in such production applications.