A focused look at the pre-increment (++i) and post-increment (i++) operators in C, covering their semantic differences, how pointer arithmetic affects increment behavior (e.g., incrementing an unsigned* by sizeof(unsigned) rather than 1), and the subtle efficiency implications for embedded systems. The author recommends defaulting to pre-increment since post-increment requires storing the original value before incrementing, which can be an unnecessary overhead — especially with complex C++ objects — even if modern compilers often optimize it away.
