Is Bare-Metal Programming Dead?Is Bare-Metal Programming Dead?

When you think about bare-metal programming, you probably envision an electrical engineer sitting at a workbench, pouring through hundreds of pages of low-level register definitions. Once the correct registers and bits are uncovered, the engineer carefully crafts code that accesses the registers in C using memory mapping techniques that have been used for decades. 

Bare-metal programming offers teams the knowledge of what their system is doing at the lowest levels and allows them to optimize and tune their systems into real-time hotrods that waste neither clock cycles nor energy. (And dare I say bill-of-material costs!)

Over the past decade, embedded software development practices have dramatically transformed. The days when engineers would laboriously handcraft every line of assembly or C code and directly interact with microcontroller registers seem to be fading quickly. We now live in an era where real-time operating systems (RTOS), sophisticated development frameworks, and code generation tools dominate the conversation. 

That begs us to ask a simple question: “Is bare-metal programming truly dead?”

The rise of abstraction layers

Fifteen years ago, starting a new embedded project usually meant bootstrapping a system from scratch. Developers wrote low-level code to initialize the clock systems, configure GPIO, and build up their peripheral drivers by tediously reading datasheets and reference manuals. This required a deep understanding of the hardware and forced developers to interact directly with registers, leaving no room for misinterpretation.

Related:7 Embedded Software Trends to Watch in 2025

Today, however, microcontroller vendors and software toolchains provide higher-level abstraction layers. Low-level drivers, CMSIS (Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard) libraries, and even board support packages are readily available. These frameworks remove a great deal of the heavy lifting. Why manually configure timers or UARTs when a code-generation tool can handle these tasks in seconds rather than days or weeks? With these abstractions, many engineers never dip into the bare-metal waters at all—and arguably, they don’t need to.

Shifting skill sets and market demands

The shifting nature of the embedded ecosystem has had consequences on skill sets. Companies now often prioritize time-to-market and flexibility over the brute force optimization that bare-metal development sometimes implies. The rise of IoT, edge computing, and connectivity means more complexity in software stacks. The skill sets in demand involve integrating multiple components—RTOSes, connectivity stacks, security libraries—rather than optimizing register-level code.

Related:The Embedded Systems Industry in 2024: Top Trends & What’s Next

This shift does not mean the need for bare-metal expertise has vanished, but it does mean that the percentage of engineers who delve into the bowels of a microcontroller’s registers is shrinking. Many younger developers might find themselves working comfortably on top of driver libraries and RTOS layers without ever having to write a single line of startup code. In fact, for many commercial products, leveraging these layers is a form of risk mitigation. It reduces development time, lowers the likelihood of subtle bugs, and often improves maintainability. (At least, that’s what we tell ourselves). 

The ongoing relevance of bare-metal skills

Declaring bare-metal programming dead would be an oversimplification. Certain classes of products still demand a high level of hardware intimacy. High-performance motor control, extremely low-power IoT nodes, and medical devices with stringent timing requirements often benefit from tightly optimized, deterministic code that can’t afford the overhead of an RTOS. In these scenarios, the ability to program at a register level—understanding interrupts, timing quirks, and memory layout—is not just relevant, but essential.

Related:Understanding Errors, Defects, & Bugs in Software Development

Moreover, bare-metal skills can provide a solid foundation for troubleshooting and debugging. When something goes wrong at a low level—when a system doesn’t boot, when a peripheral refuses to respond—the best tool you have is understanding how the hardware behaves at its most fundamental level. Even if developers spend their days working with abstraction layers, the underlying principles of bare-metal programming will guide them when the abstractions fail or produce perplexing anomalies.

If you believe that bare-metal is dead or dying, take a moment to peruse your favorite supplier’s website, something like DigiKey's. You’ll find over 80,620 different microcontrollers available through that one supplier, and this is just a portion. Tighten the search to 8-bit microcontrollers and you’ll find 23,457. That’s more than 25% of the overall total available! These parts are often resource-constrained enough that bare-metal techniques aren’t just needed, but required!

Bare-metal is evolving, not disappearing

Rather than declaring bare-metal programming dead, it’s more accurate to say that its role is evolving. The embedded software community and ecosystem have matured, embracing new standards, frameworks, and tools that streamline and accelerate development. As a result, many engineers may never “see” the bare metal in their daily work—at least not explicitly. But it’s still there, powering the system, and the best engineers know when and how to peel back the layers to gain that extra bit of control and insight.

While you may not use bare-metal daily, you will find that even the most sophisticated systems will still require you to understand these techniques. For example, bare-metal will often be used when the provided SDKs and auto-generated libraries don’t meet performance or memory needs. There are have been many instances over the last several years where the vendor-supplied libraries were just too slow for what the system needed. When that happened, it was necessary to go in and either tweak the supplied code or rewrite it from scratch. 

When you review the latest technology articles, you’ll often feel like the entire industry is doing AI/ML, running on multi-core processors running at 100s of MHz. While these projects get the most press, they are also the latest and greatest technologies that haven’t been fully adopted yet. Even if they have, there will always be a need to understand bare-metal so that you can debug and optimize your system. 

So, is bare-metal programming dead?

In the end, bare-metal programming is neither dead nor obsolete. It remains a cornerstone of our industry’s body of knowledge. The difference is that today, it’s a skill set you keep in your back pocket rather than one you wield constantly. For many projects, starting at a higher level of abstraction is simply the most practical choice. But when the chips are down—metaphorically and literally—understanding how to wrestle control at the bare-metal level continues to be a prized and valuable skill.

To learn more, attend my upcoming CEC course January 27-31: Expert C Techniques to Master Bare-Metal Programming. You’ll discover how to master one of C’s most powerful tools—function pointers—and use them to design flexible, efficient systems. From building cooperative schedulers and command parsers to creating configurable, reusable code, you’ll gain hands-on insights that can transform your approach to embedded programming.

But that’s just the beginning. We’ll explore performance analysis and system architecture, equipping you with strategies to optimize your code and ensure your system operates flawlessly. You’ll also learn how to use assertions as a powerful debugging and validation tool, ensuring your code is robust and reliable. Whether you’re looking to sharpen your skills or tackle your next embedded project with confidence, this course will provide the tools and knowledge you need to succeed.