[tialaramex]

I can definitely see the objection to running Nightly to build actual embedded systems. Two ex-colleagues built embedded devices that were intentionally injected into glaciers for measurement purposes, obviously "Oops, we need to upgrade them" isn't much more of a thing while they're working than for the Mars rovers - if you don't have a way to remotely upgrade the part that needs changing, or your radio upgrade fails and you brick the device you can't send a field technician to fix it.

And personally I never run Nightly, I did AoC for example entirely in stable because I don't feel like I need more excitement in my life.

The "it looks alien" thing (which is how I read your comment about "looks like AWS lambda code to me") I think is a place where Godbolt can help you if you're serious enough about low-level to be at least confident reading assembler even if you never write any. Matt Godbolt built Compiler Explorer's ancestors because he knew that nicer C++ iterators claimed to have the same performance characteristics as the good-old C style for loops he'd grown up with but he needed to be sure that was a fact before he moved vital performance critical software to them. Compiler Explorer shows that yup, you get equivalent assembler, the machine is doing the exact same work as before. I think you'll find Rust's "like AWS lambda code" for interrupt handlers is eventually doing the same low-level bit twiddling you're used to writing, but presented in a different (safer) way.

FWIW HN formats the space-prefixed paragraphs in your text as fixed pitch like code, which is annoying for people on small devices when you aren't actually showing code or diagrams where spacing is important to understanding.

[pjmlp]

And now we can even do the same exercise across multiple compiled languages to prove point that C isn't special.