4 ms·

> As far as the abstraction, when does it get to a point the compiler can't undo the abstraction? The early 8-bit systems were so constrained in everything fro

> As far as the abstraction, when does it get to a point the compiler can't undo the abstraction? The early 8-bit systems were so constrained in everything from memory to registers, instruction set, and clock speed, that using a high level language wasn't an option if you were trying to optimize performance or squeeze a lot of functionality into available memory. An 8-bit system would have a 64KB address space, but maybe only 16-32KB of RAM, with the rest used by the "OS" and mapped to the display, etc. The 6502 was especially impoverished, having only three 8-bit registers and a very minimalistic instruction set. Writing performant software for it depended heavily on using "zero-page" memory (special addressing mode to access 1st 256 bytes of memory) to hold variables, rather than passing stack based parameters to functions, etc. It was really a completely different style of programming and mindset to using a high level language - not about language abstraction, but a painful awareness of the bare metal you were running on all the time.

dylan604 1y ago
When I asked, it was based on my use of Arduino IDE where one writes higher level code that then gets compiled into machine code. I had a project where I was using multiple sensors where I could not store each of their responses in memory to write to a log in one shot. Instead, I had to write to the log after reading each sensor directly and releasing the memory at the end of each loop. I was originally hoping to do more analysis with the data onboard the Arduino, but in hindsight, that was a pretty dumb idea. The sensing platform should do just that. Do the analysis in post.