I'm looking for recommendations on where to start with learning systems programming. Ideally, I'd like to be able to get to a point where I can make a living doing it, but currently I just want to do fun stuff to build up curiosity around it.
Here's all of the "low-level" stuff that I know so far / imagine being useful. I... - Have enough of an understanding of networking to write a toy HTTP server on top of TCP - Know enough C to write some basic terminal tools + window applications if needed (on Linux) - Love terminal tools like neovim + several core utils - Have dabbled with Arduino/ESP32 & communicating via USB over the serial port with a host pc - Am pretty decent with Python, and have been using it for like 10 years
Some things that I've been curious about in the past - Converting parts of python libraries from pure python to C/C++ bindings for better performance - Writing a terminal based file manager to work with Google Chrome - Actually contributing to chromium (my laptop is a potato though so all of my builds fail)
About me: I'm in my junior year of uni studying CS, and I've been able to make money doing web dev for the past 2 years of my degree. For many reasons including curiosity and the fact that AI makes me feel replaceable doing many frontend + backend tasks, though I'm very curious about getting into lower level programming.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
abhisek•10mo ago
As you already know, C/C++ helps with low level software layers that interface with or manage hardware resources. In my experience, Go and Rust are also pretty much used as systems programming languages. For example, I use Go and EBPF to instrument systems calls on Linux kernel.
For me, most of my learning came from solving problems and building for specific use-cases. I think getting into builder mode and creating some cool will definitely accelerate your learning.