I've been burned far more often by O(n^2) algorithms being used inappropriately than by slightly too high memory usage. It usually comes up when you give a piece of software an order of magnitude more data than it's used to, and discover it becomes unusable.
Resource constrained firmware is a special case, because the package is tested as a unit, rather than individual software modules which may themselves be used in very different use cases. The default algorithm should still usually be exponential growth, with tuning back where necessary to meet memory usage goals.
Resource constrained firmware is a special case, because the package is tested as a unit, rather than individual software modules which may themselves be used in very different use cases. The default algorithm should still usually be exponential growth, with tuning back where necessary to meet memory usage goals.