I've also worked on the hardware side a bit as well as in EDA (Electronic Design Automation)- the software used to design hardware. Since you already commented on the hardware side of things, I'll comment on the EDA side. The EDA industry is also very backwards and highly insular - it felt like an old boys club. When I worked in EDA in the late aughts we were still using a version of gcc from about 2000. They did not trust the C++ STL so they continued to use their own containers from the mid-90s - they did not want to use C++ templates at all so generic programming was out. While we did run Linux it was also a very ancient version of RedHat - about 4 years behind. The company was also extremely siloed - we could probably have reused a lot of code from other groups that were doing some similar things, but there was absolutely no communication between the groups let alone some kind of central code repo.
EDA is very essential for chip development at this point and it seems like an industry ripe for disruption. We're seeing some inroads by open source EDA software - simulators (Icarus, Verilator, GHDL), synthesis (yosys) and even open cores and SOC constructors like LiteX. In software land we've had open source compilers for over 30 years now (gcc for example), let's hope that some of these open source efforts make some serious inroads in EDA.
> did run Linux it was also a very ancient version of RedHat - about 4 years behind
How is a 4 years old distribution "very ancient"? There's very likely plenty of Ubuntu 16.04 in the field, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
RedHat uses "old" kernels, if that's what you refer to with "ancient" but there are reasons for that, and they're also backported, they're not unupdated.
What does this mean? I've only been in the C++ game for 6 years and for me if I can get something from std rather than rolling my own or pulling in another library, I'm cheering.
Yes they're wonderful to have, don't get me wrong! They're general-purpose and robust! But they're also insufficient for a lot of needs. One thing that comes up for me a lot is a lack of static-allocated structures, and sometimes there are optimizations that can be made by sacrificing certain functionality.
EA’s STL had more to do with custom allocators and the fact that a lot of the platforms we were developing for 10 years ago didn’t have mmap or paged memory management (or at least nothing that they wanted to expose to us lowly user-mode gamedevs).
EDA is very essential for chip development at this point and it seems like an industry ripe for disruption. We're seeing some inroads by open source EDA software - simulators (Icarus, Verilator, GHDL), synthesis (yosys) and even open cores and SOC constructors like LiteX. In software land we've had open source compilers for over 30 years now (gcc for example), let's hope that some of these open source efforts make some serious inroads in EDA.