I enjoy this article showing up here once in a while. It makes me think about the stack of abstractions we actually live in… CPU -> microcode -> ISA -> firmware

I enjoy this article showing up here once in a while. It makes me think about the stack of abstractions we actually live in… CPU -> microcode -> ISA -> firmware/BIOS -> OS + drivers -> C abstract machine -> your app. ( I left our virtualization purposely thinking of a bare metal stack ) Current ISAs have so much machinery underneath that it’s hard to tell when you’re talking to the iron and when you’re talking to the microcode You can still argue that Forth on a Forth CPU is a genuinely low-level language. :)