A flyback is critical in anything involving a magnetic field, especially a collapsing magnetic field from a motor that stops spinning. The field collapse induces a relatively huge current which will be many many many times greater than anything a normal component is designed for.

Not having one is like driving your car down the highway without any breaks. The only way to stop is to crash.

So your suggestion is actually introducing a second magnetic field, so now you've doubled the chances of blowing up your Pi and or the MOSFET.

Whether you're using a transistor/MOSFET directly with a motor or instead with relay + motor you need the flyback diode.

I hope this refers to ring-0-like instructions such as x86 STI, and not some kind of OEM/manufacturer "you can only use this set of instructions if you pay us" type privilege?

If after a decade there are so many details still obscured from you, then that's pretty much again a fault of the overly-engineered and tacked on language called C++.

Other mainstream language work fine and allow you to still write clean and modern code without having literally dozens of subsets and implementations. So why is it that C++ feels the need to have so many?

I feel you might be understating this! FPGA's and ASIC's have in fact been in use for decades now, they are very much ingrained into many high end products. Any digital oscilloscope has an FPGA, and has done for a very long time, for example. These are often either used in combination with a CPU for the UI part. The CPU might either be an IC on the PCB or what is quite popular is having the CPU be a synthesised one programmed into the FPGA.

ARM, for example, have a whole architecture specifically designed for optimal FPGA synthesis.

There are a number of relatively cheap SBC's out there with an FPGA too. http://linuxgizmos.com/tiny-sbc-runs-linux-on-xilinx-zynq-ar...

    public Result WriteValue(T value) where T : INumeric/Numeric { }

:(

So instead the interface has an identical method for ints, doubles, floats, decimals, strings...

But there are literally billions of 8bit and 16bit embedded systems out there, many of which have a C compiler.