Is Boost.Statechart suitable for embedded applications?
It depends. As explained under Speed versus scalability tradeoffs on the Performance page, the virtually limitless scalability offered by this library does have its price. Especially small and simple FSMs can easily be implemented so that they consume fewer cycles and less memory and occupy less code space in the executable. Here are some obviously very rough estimates: • For a state machine with at most one simultaneously active state (that is, the machine is flat and does not have orthogonal regions) with trivial actions, customized memory management and compiled with a good optimizing compiler, a Pentium 4 class CPU should not spend more than 1000 cycles inside state_machine<>::process_event(). This worst-case time to process one event scales more or less linearly with the number of simultaneously active states for more complex state machines, with the typical average being much lower than that. So, a fairly complex machine with at most 10 simultaneously active states running on a 1
