Introduction to Systems Programming

Catalog description

Unix system programming in C; organization of programs and data; program analysis and support tools; software standards; common system functions. CMPSC 311 CMPSC 311 Introduction to Systems Programming (3) System Programming concerns the development of software components and methods for their combination, independent of any particular application. This course will provide information and experience required to understand, design and implement components of large software systems.In general, students should be able to evaluate design alternatives according to standard practice, specifications, performance analysis, robustness, etc. To concentrate attention, we investigate one system and one programming language in detail, through demonstration programs, short- and long-term programming assignments. The specific system is Unix, a family of operating systems forming a complete standardized programming environment based on the idea of software tools. The specific language is C, which is widely used for operating system implementations, and which forms the basis for the C++ and Java languages studied in the prerequisite courses. This will help students understand operating system services available to application programmers, and provide a firm ground for study of operating systems in general.There are several themes of the course:(1) Understand computer systems, especially low-level influences on high-level goals. This includes the machine-level representation of programs and data structures; the memory hierarchy and its impact on performance; access to stored information via file systems, and access to other computer systems via networks.(2) Understand existing system software and software standards, especially the UNIX toolset. This includes preparing a program (editors, static analysis, development environments); running a program (compilers and interpreters, assembler, linker, loader, debugger, profiler, tracer); controlling parts of a program (memory management, threads); communication between programs (within one system using signals, between systems using sockets and communication protocols); and combinations of software tools with scripting languages.(3) Understand "real code", such as selections from the Linux operating system kernel and GNU utilities and libraries, and through comparative selections from Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X.(4) Understand system performance, including experiments on program performance and optimization techniques.