Embedded
Share:
For this section we choose those who checked “Hardware” or “Home automation” in the question “What types of software do you develop?”
C99
C11
C17/C18
Embedded C
I'm not sure
Other
C++98 / C++03
C++11
C++14
C++17
C++20
I'm not sure

C++ developers tend to adopt the newest language standards more actively, while C developers are more conservative and stick to older ones.
Ilia Motornyi
CLion Developer, Embedded development hobbyist
C++ | C | Rust | |
---|---|---|---|
33% | 30% | 43% | Visual Studio Code |
25% | 21% | 31% | CLion |
23% | 10% | 1% | Visual Studio |
3% | 11% | 6% | Vi / Vim |
– | – | 8% | IntelliJ IDEA |
3% | 5% | – | Eclipse CDT |
2% | 3% | 5% | Emacs |
3% | 2% | – | QtCreator |
1% | 2% | – | Xcode |
7% | 15% | 5% | Other |
If you are interested in trying CLion for embedded development, check out this overview article and setup instructions.
34%
15%
Google Test
14%
4%
Catch
14%
4%
CppUnit
7%
3%
Boost.Test
5%
3%
CppUTest

More and more developers write tests, though many C developers don't use test frameworks. There likely are no decent ones yet.
Ilia Motornyi
CLion Developer, Embedded development hobbyist
69%
78%
CMake
50%
58%
Makefiles
32%
29%
Visual Studio project
16%
13%
Ninja
14%
11%
Qmake

CMake is very popular among embedded developers and MCU vendors. The Zephyr project, ESP IDF, and nRF SDK have been migrated to CMake.
Ilia Motornyi
CLion Developer, Embedded development hobbyist
28%
–
The library source code is part of my build
26%
–
I compile the libraries separately using their instructions
24%
25%
I use a system package manager
21%
–
I download prebuilt libraries from the internet
7%
7%
Nuget
Thank you for your time!
We hope you found our report useful. Share this report with your friends and colleagues.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us at surveys@jetbrains.com.