I wrote firmware (~20kLocs) for a power (electrical) supply that's part of one such power train.

This kind of development is very demanding, because you can't afford to leave any bugs in your program but at the same time you're always shipping late because of tight schedules and often blurry specifications.

On top of that hardware and software development cycles are concurrent, so no target hardware available when you're writing your code.

In these conditions the only way I found to have something that works is to keep it very simple:

    1. Simple algorithms
    2. Simple data structures
    3. Few abstractions
    4. No dynamic memory allocations

Also, no compiler optimizations.