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bare metal: n. 1. [common] New computer hardware, unadorned with such snares and
delusions as an operating system, an
HLL, or even assembler. Commonly used in the phrase
programming on the bare metal, which
refers to the arduous work of bit bashing needed to
create these basic tools for a new machine. Real bare-metal programming
involves things like building boot proms and BIOS chips, implementing basic
monitors used to test device drivers, and writing the assemblers that will
be used to write the compiler back ends that will give the new machine a
real development environment. 2. “Programming on the bare metal” is also used to
describe a style of hand-hacking that relies on
bit-level peculiarities of a particular hardware design, esp. tricks for
speed and space optimization that rely on crocks such as overlapping
instructions (or, as in the famous case described in The Story of Mel' (in Appendix A),
interleaving of opcodes on a magnetic drum to minimize fetch delays due to
the device's rotational latency). This sort of thing has become rare as
the relative costs of programming time and machine resources have changed,
but is still found in heavily constrained environments such as industrial
embedded systems. See Real Programmer.
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