""Slow and Clunky" - that's a nebulous term at best! Slow is relative to what we want to achieve - if a floating point operation takes 1ms and that is acceptable for the application then it is not 'slow' and as for 'clunky' is software floating point any less clunky on a 32 bit cpu?"

"Back to the RTOS issue - any RTOS has an overhead for the task switch and the RTOS management itself. Again, in light of the application we have to weigh up whether to use a RTOS or not and if we use a RTOS, can we cope with the task switching overhead."

I agree entirely. If a project can be completed successfully in a timely and cost efficient manner then the tools used were the right ones. I use a lot of floating point on the 8051 - it makes my life so much easier and works flawlessly. If I listened to the luddites who trot out the same old stuff every time this sort of debate comes up I'd still be entering opcodes with DIP switches. Or something.

"Again, I wouldn't recommend a RTOS on a 8051, but if the app had to have an 8051 and had to have a RTOS and the performance was adequate - then so be it."

If you were to change that sentence to:

'Again, I wouldn't generally recommend a RTOS on a 8051, but if the performance was adequate - then why not?'

Then I'd agree with it as well.