I discovered Kidder's book while I was digging into what microcode actually was. I had been thinking about what a huge impedance mismatch it was to write in C t

I discovered Kidder's book while I was digging into what microcode actually was. I had been thinking about what a huge impedance mismatch it was to write in C targeting an abstract machine that resembles of a PDP-11 and expecting the CPU to translate the instructions for that abstract machine into an architecture is that drastically different. Microcode is the magic, it's the compiler internals that we don't have access to. I really wish we could get a modern CPU with a writable microcode store so research could happen in the open.