optimization that rely on crocks such as overlapping instructions (or,
as in the famous case described in [1106]The Story of Mel (in Appendix
A), interleaving of opcodes on a magnetic drum to minimize fetch
delays due to the device's rotational latency). This sort of thing has
become less common as the relative costs of programming time and
machine resources have changed, but is still found in heavily
constrained environments such as industrial embedded systems, and in
the code of hackers who just can't let go of that low-level control.
See [1107]Real Programmer.

In the world of personal computing, bare metal programming (especially
in sense 1 but sometimes also in sense 2) is often considered a
[1108]Good Thing, or at least a necessary evil (because these machines
have often been sufficiently slow and poorly designed to make it
necessary; see [1109]ill-behaved). There, the term usually refers to
bypassing the BIOS or OS interface and writing the application to
directly access device registers and machine addresses. "To get 19.2
kilobaud on the serial port, you need to get down to the bare metal."
People who can do this sort of thing well are held in high regard.
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B =

barf /barf/ n.,v.

[common; from mainstream slang meaning `vomit'] 1. interj. Term of
disgust. This is the closest hackish equivalent of the Valspeak "gag
me with a spoon". (Like, euwww!) See [1113]bletch. 2. vi. To say
"Barf!" or emit some similar expression of disgust. "I showed him my