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