I have often wondered... Could you make a video game for these platforms, Nintendo or iOS, where there is a fully... is endogenous the word? virtual machine in the game world that you could program on? Like, the registers and compute cycles weren't real ticks, they actually happen within the game loop? Like, if I made a space sim¹, and the flight computer ran on PICO-8², and there were actual transistors in the space…
Nintendo does tend to allow things that let users "code" their own games, as long as it's well-checked and the devs are upfront about it. See SmileBasic(http://smilebasic.com/en/), a commercial BASIC interpreter for 3DS that let's you make simple games, condoned by Nintendo and sold on the eShop. Coincidentally, it led to 2 separate exploit chains that allow for native code execution - Nintendo doesn't want any of that and it's understandable that they want to avoid any possibility of it happening, especially if the groundwork for such an exploit is getting snuck in as a legitimate game without even telling them about it. People will always find their way around sandboxes and limitations, especially on a highly targeted system like the switch.