Game engine development or going even lower and dabbling in embedded. Embedded in particular helped me to understand computers way more in depth than I would have just sticking even to application-side C.
Also, learn Rust.
Ask HN: Going low-level – what to learn next?
11–20 of 59 posts
Re: Ask HN: Going low-level – what to learn next?
#12to be honest, i think you have it all there - now write something useful using it
Re: Ask HN: Going low-level – what to learn next?
#13Might not exactly be very low level but I really liked the learn c programming by dr. chuck youtube course on freecodecamp youtube
Re: Ask HN: Going low-level – what to learn next?
#14an optimizing Lua or Lisp compiler
Re: Ask HN: Going low-level – what to learn next?
#15Proceed to highload.fun. Read the resources in the highload.fun wiki.
Re: Ask HN: Going low-level – what to learn next?
#16Go all the way down, grab an FPGA dev board and learn Verilog/VHDL!
Re: Ask HN: Going low-level – what to learn next?
#17What you're basically after is some "Tooling and Methodology" studies for embedded. You've got the basics, but now you need to learn some more tools and the methods that make those tools really useful to the embedded/low-level context.
Some simple things you can do:
* Get yourself a suitable embedded development system - I would recommend anything ESP32'ish that suits your fancy such as a Liligo or Watchy ESP32-based watch, or PineTime if thats more up your alley - and then write some little apps for it.
* Get to know Godbolt with a great deal of intimacy, just as a general approach to understanding what is going on:
* Invest a little workbench time in some of the various embedded frameworks out there - platformio, FreeRTOS, etc. and, very important: learn the Tooling And Methodology techniques that these frameworks manifest.
* Invest some workbench time in the RETRO Computing Scene. Seriously, you can still learn extremely valuable principles of tooling and methodology from an 8-bit retro system from the 80's. Get your favourite platform, get all its tools onboard, engage with its community - you will learn a lot of things that are still entirely relevant, in spite of the changes over the decades.
* Get into the F/OSS tooling/methdology flow - find software projects that are interesting to you, find their repositories, learn to clone and build and test locally, and so on. There are so many fantastic projects out there for which low-level skills can be developed/fostered. Get onboard with something that interests you.
Good luck!
Re: Ask HN: Going low-level – what to learn next?
#18an optimizing Lua or Lisp compiler
Yes: +1, this.
Learning Lua is a great way to get introduced to a lot of low-level concepts, from bytecode to VM's to language design and beyond.
Re: Ask HN: Going low-level – what to learn next?
#19Give Performance-Aware Programming series by Casey Muratori a try!
Re: Ask HN: Going low-level – what to learn next?
#20If you like game progrmaming I recommend some of the low level C courses by Pikuma. I've done the 3D graphics from scratch course and will do the Playstation 1 Programming course next.