>>107
I didn't say "4MB" anywhere. I said "4KB" in one instance and "4GB" in another. The 4KB limit is there because sometimes that's all you get in firmware. In a lot of cases, you even have to tell your compiler or RTOS in advance how much of that 4KB will be stack space/heap/etc... It sucks. The whole system has more than 4KB, but it's very common that some particular task only gets a tiny little piece of that to work with.
But like I said, I also work on the PC side of things. And in fact, the PC software is also necessarily multi-threaded. And it's also very complex. You seem to be implying that there's just no way to do concurrency without throwing in the towel on memory management, but I can assure you that's not the case. Even modern FPS games generally put their AI and possibly other tasks like physics or audio into separate threads.
people writing software and the people creating hardware leading us in a completely arbitrary direction
Sorry, I just can't buy this... All the hardware guys ever do is make faster CPUs and bigger memory, and you can't really call that an arbitrary direction. And who cares what the people writing software are doing? You can use any platform/language/paradigm you want. Are you concerned that your particular choice won't have enough library support or something?