It was defined by an industry group led by major Japanese central processing unit (CPU) manufacturers, including NEC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, and Toshiba, to address the shortcomings of C++ for embedded applications.
The goal of the effort[1] is to preserve the most useful object-oriented features of the C++ language yet minimize code size while maximizing execution efficiency and making compiler construction simpler.
Compilers specific to EC++ are provided by companies such as: The language has had a poor reception with many expert C++ programmers.
Nevertheless, a restricted subset of C++ (based on Embedded C++) has been adopted by Apple Inc. as the exclusive programming language to create all I/O Kit device drivers for Apple's macOS, iPadOS and iOS operating systems of the popular Macintosh, iPhone, and iPad products.
[8] Apple engineers felt the exceptions, multiple inheritance, templates, and runtime type information features of standard C++ were either insufficient or not efficient enough for use in a high-performance, multithreaded kernel.