CAD software (and other high-end professional software) can easily cost 5-10x as much as the computer itself. You buy the computer for the software, not the other way around.
Strings are a really weird data type. I'm not sure you can do much better than C strings without implicitly requiring dynamic memory allocation, which C deliberately does not do.
Definitely agree on multidimensional arrays. I feel like efficient arrays in general are underrated in high-level language design.
> Strings are a really weird data type. I'm not sure you can do much better than C strings without implicitly requiring dynamic memory allocation, which C deliberately does not do.
The thing you want is what Rust delivers in the box, &str a string slice reference type, in Rust's case the "string" is UTF-8 encoded text. On the bare metal the way to represent this type is as a "fat pointer" typically a pair of registers, one with the address of the first byte of the string and the other with a length.
C should have fat pointers, they were proposed, for IIRC C89 but the proposal was rejected. That's pretty sad, the fat pointer is expensive to the point of maybe feeling extravagant on a PDP-11, but by 1989 that's long gone.
More ridiculously C++ didn't get this type (which it eventually called std::string_view and provides in its standard library not as a built-in) until 2017, years after Rust 1.0 shipped. In the meanwhile C++ just did not have a sensible way to do this, strings are hard apparently.
The string buffer feature, allowing you to actually make strings is less important, as you say it will need an allocator and so on very bare metal you might not have this - but the string slice reference doesn't need an allocator.
I think it's worth delivering the basic "it's a growable array type, duh" implemenation of the string buffer type, which is what Rust's String type is, but C++ chooses to ship an oddly specific small-string optimized version as std::string right from the offset.
According to her Wikipedia page, she's ~23 and went to Harvard, so A) her life experience is limited, B) most of the experience she does have involves being on a path to elitehood, and C) she probably sees a chance at a life-changing amount of money here.
People like this are the input side of the "oops we built the Torment Nexus" pipeline.
My favorite color in all the world is the green of a mineral called dioptase. It's a deep, dark green, richer than an emerald. It looks amazing in real life and utterly boring on an RGB display. The Houston Museum of Natural Science has a large sample; every time I'm there I go stare at it for a while.
I feel like this poem isn't really about soldering, but if anyone is actually bothered by it, there are some options.
Unleaded solder and a decent fume extractor make the process cleaner. A decent soldering iron and solder wire with good-quality flux (e.g. Kester) makes it faster.
If you'd rather not deal with the iron, you can manually apply solder paste and use a hot air rework tool or even a heat gun (careful!) to melt it. (A proper reflow oven is better, of course, but that's pricey.) This makes working with surface-mount components much easier.
If you'd rather not deal with it at all, have a PCB assembled somewhere else. JLC is pretty cheap, especially on simpler boards.
>A proper reflow oven is better, of course, but that's pricey.
You can do a lot worse than a $55 temperature controlled hot plate. Plus you can watch the magic happen. Of course that only works for single sided boards. I've been very impressed with the results.
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