Hackaday Europe 2026: Bare Metal Made Easy

When we talk about programming in “bare metal,” it basically means writing software that runs right on the hardware with no operating system or abstraction layers in between. Europe 2026: Bare Metal Made Easy. This gives the program the most direct possible access to peripherals and memory, with the tradeoff being that you don’t get the protection and ancillary features that come with an OS.

Sylvain Huet came down to Europe 2026 to talk about making bare metal easy. Not just by ignoring operating systems and ever-bloating dependencies, but by rethinking the way we approach software development and by building a transparent platform from the ground up. Down To Brass Tacks Sylvain’s computing journey began with the Thompson T07, in an era when the line between operating systems and bare metal was wafer thin.

Since then, we’ve sheathed our CPUs in ever deeper layers of abstraction. Sylvain begins the talk with a look at where his own computing journey began. Back in 1982, he got his hands on a Thomson TO7, with just 8 kilobytes of user RAM and a 6809 CPU.