Comment by tonyarkles

> On an ECU I worked on, the cache was turned off to not have cache misses ... no cache no problem. I argued it should be turned on and the "OK cpu load" limit decreased instead. But nope.

Yeah, the tradeoff there is interesting. Sometimes "get it as deterministic as possible" is the right answer, even if it's slower.

> Most of the strangeness in real time coding is actually about doing control theory stuff is my take. The program often feels like state-machine going in a circle.

Lol, with my colleagues/juniors I'll often encourage them to take code that doesn't look like that and figure out if there's a sane way to turn it into "state-machine going in a circle". For problems that fit that mold, being able to say "event X in state Y will have effect Z" is really powerful for being able to reason about the system. Plus, sometimes, you can actually use that state machine to more formally reason about it or even informally just draw out the states, events, and transitions and identify if there's anywhere you might get stuck.