[analog31]

Indeed, a bit of confusion about "Arduino" is that it has come to mean two things. One is the original Arduino board and its "branded" successors. The other is the development stack. In the latter case, it's GCC with some libraries and a beginner friendly editor. It's bare-iron programming.

Thinking about dealing with an encoder, let's say it has 8k counts per revolution, and the motor can do 10 revolutions per second, which is pretty fast for a stepping motor. Then the encoder steps are coming in at an 80 kHz rate, but an 180 MHz MCU can execute a couple thousand instructions in that time period, so it's not even breathing hard.