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Ask HN: How do you get into systems programming
13 points by otherayden on April 28, 2025 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments
Hi all!

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!



On software side, building an OS (distribution) from scratch provides a step above bare metal programming[0].

Provides familiarity with different types of things a kernel does via programs/scripts that make use of kernel.

Actually writing binary code for kernel bit can be done under qem[1][2]. aka don't need to buy actual hardware, can use 'software probes' to view what's going on, etc. Don't have to worry about 'crashing'/trashing box running on (just crash the qem software & loosing just what was done in qem session, if didn't save as 'export/save to external location outside of qem session')

"Reading OpenBSD source code daily (blog.tintagel.pl)" from [hn: 3] automated way to review code.

-----

[0] : https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

[1] : qem for kernel developers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyWlpuntdU4

[2] : https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2017/01/16/sett...

[hn:3] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14521386


It sounds like you're doing the normal sort of things that systems people do to get started. The fact that you have lots of ideas to jump off of is very good. In general just follow all of your ideas down as far as you can to the base systems. Write the TCP implementation for your HTTP server and run it over the internet for example. You've only gone too far when you start worrying about noise and debugging looks like randomly grounding metal things.


IMHO there is neither baseline nor “enough” when it comes to learning any programming language for any reasonably complex domain.

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.


Sounds like you’re doing some interesting stuff and have a good, varied skill base to build on.

My advice would be to jump in and start working on kernel level stuff, or writing your own - IMO there’s no finer way to really “get” the low level concepts and the understanding you’ll build will really help with any other system-level stuff you do.

Not to plug, but if you were interested in getting involved in an existing project, my own toy kernel project[0] is at a point where there’s still lots of fun stuff left to do (both design- and implementation-wise) but a lot of the basic “project plumbing” and one-time machine setup stuff that people often get stuck on is already done, and I’d be glad to have the opportunity to share knowledge.

[0] : https://github.com/roscopeco/anos


Oxide and Friends has an episode on the topic [1], I found interesting.

[1] : https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/paths-into-...




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