Embedded C++ : to use STL or not?

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I work on real-time embedded systems every day. Of course, my definition of embedded system may be different than yours. But we make full use of the STL and exceptions and do not experience any unmanageable problems. We also make use of dynamic memory (at a very high rate; allocating lots of packets per second, etc.) and have not yet needed to resort to any custom allocators or memory pools. We have even used C++ in interrupt handlers. We don’t use boost, but only because a certain government agency won’t let us.

It is our experience you can indeed use many modern C++ features in an embedded environment as long as you use your head and conduct your own benchmarks. I highly recommend you make use of Scott Meyer’s Effective C++ 3rd edition as well as Sutter and Alexandrescu’s C++ Coding Standards to assist you in using C++ with a sane programming style.

Edit: After getting an upvote on this 2 years later, let me post an update. We are much farther along in our development and we have finally hit spots in our code where the standard library containers are too slow under high performance conditions. Here we did in fact resort to custom algorithms, memory pools, and simplified containers. That is the beauty of C++ though, you can use the standard library and get all the good things it provides for 90% of your use cases. You don’t throw it all out when you meet problems, you just hand-optimize the trouble spots.

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