Comment by Etheryte
8 hours ago
Because the production environment might be a completely different architecture, these details matter a lot. Works on my machine is not useful if your actual target is a small embedded system on top of a cell tower in the middle of nowhere. Granted, most people don't work on stuff like that, I imagine the vast majority of devs here are web developers, but even still it's an interesting discussion even if you haven't run into it yourself. Maybe even more so in that case.
Um, as an embedded developer, you don't develop the code to run on your machine, you develop it to run on the same target as you expect to deploy to, sitting on your desk next to you.
I have lots of my code running day-in, day-out on literally hundreds of millions of machines. The approach to "getting it working" is exactly OP's.
I'll admit to being pretty defensive and anal in checking values and return-codes (more so than most, I suspect), and I'm a firm believer in KISS principles in software engineering ("solving hard problems with complicated code is easy, solving them with simple, understandable algorithms is the hard bit") but generally there's no real difference in approach to the code I write to work on my workstation, and the code I write to work in the field.
Embedded developers often suffer under archaic toolchains. There's plenty of reasons for that, but one of them is UB: a newer version of the compiler can completely change an embedded program's behaviour.
Where I was it was quite the opposite. The bloody compiler guys kept on updating the compiler, and we were required to use the OS-delivered one. Since we were often using pre-release OS's, the toolchain could change every week.
It did make you write robust and defensive code, though...