When you don't have the overhead of an operating system with decades of backward compatibility cruft, a scheduler, a virtual memory controller, and a file system you can accomplish amazing things with simple processors. Bare metal is something I'd encourage every programmer to try.

Yeah exactly, we now have so many layers of stuff. On top of vmem & OS, add high def displays, and today’s corporate firewall and malware scanning. I wouldn’t be surprised if just booting my Win 11 laptop, logging in, and launching Teams uses more compute than the entire Galileo mission used over its entire 8 year run. :P

Even without the layers & cruft though, the raw perf is astounding to those of us who remember 8 bit 1Mhz microprocessors. Today’s gamers are used to double-digit teraflops(!) of compute, just to render all the pixels for Minecraft or Fortnite.

I don’t know if there’s a better way these days, but for me Arduino has been an easy & super fun way to futz with a tiny bare metal microprocessor.