[TheOtherHobbes]

Why do programmers in 2023 need to imagine a virtual machine (basically a PDP-11 from 1970-something) at all?

You only need that abstraction if you're doing low level bit/byte bashing and I/O, or there's some chance you may run out of memory and need to handle that manually.

That applies to a tiny slice of all possible applications.

There are far more useful modern abstractions that don't need to make those assumptions.

[Joker_vD]

> basically a PDP-11 from 1970-something

That PDP-11 from the seventies had ADC/SBC (addition/subtraction with carry) in its instruction set, the result of MUL was twice the size of the inputs (i.e., multiplying two ints produced a long), and DIV produced both the quoitient and the remainder. None of that is visible from C and yet people keep clamoring that "C is close to the metal". Bah, humbug: while " * p++" and " * --p" idioms translate directly into an addressing mode particular for PDP-11 — most other architectures don't have autoincrement/decrements — there is no specific support for " * ++p " or " * p--" in the machine itself.

[lordnacho]

Yeah that's true, and that's why people don't use C for stuff that isn't close to the metal. If you're just serving some web page you can just think about the business logic and a higher level language will deal with the rest for you.

But someone's got to write drivers and someone's got to write the thing that connects the higher levels to the metal.

[TheLoafOfBread]

Because when you are writing drivers for MCUs, you are writing into arbitrary pieces of memory on arbitrary addresses specified by reference manual for you MCU. And when you will write 0xABCD into memory address 0xF120, then your UART will throw out 0xA, 0xB, 0xC, 0xD on a pin using clocks defined by register 0xF124 which is actually a divider definition from VCO connected to XTAL.

No amount of abstraction under any language will isolate you from such memory model.