As a kind of extreme example, I've gone off and duplicated a whole computing stack because I think C is the wrong abstraction. For example, the way signed and unsigned numbers are defined in the C standard really over-complicates simple programs. We often don't care about portability in these days of instruction set monoculture.

Here's how I render the silhouette of the Mandelbrot set using fixed-point math on my computer. Each statement translates to a single x86 instruction. To detect overflow in a computation I don't perform more computation. I just use the processor's overflow flag, which C "abstracts" from me.

http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/mandelbrot-fixed.mu.html

Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu