Ask HN: How do I start learning about lower level compiled languages?

FWIW, I doubt anyone was suggesting "large scale applications programming in C"..Just the nuts & bolts & basic vocabulary..the way a program/process interacts with an OS, etc. in the very simple cases/scenarios. The main (but not only) way people use Nim is through the C backend. { The code generated by the Nim compiler is not that easy to read or intended to be so, of course. } There are also OS books to consider like The Design of The Unix OS or Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment. These also use very minimal little C examples. Everyone learns differently, though. I think more delineated goals and background level would yield better advice for @budafish.

Teaching has also evolved over the decades. Teaching of C was/is more "hand in hand" with the ideas the poster was asking about. For example, the K&R C book walks you through writing both stack allocators and heap allocators on top of raw memory.

If you can, buy the 3rd edition (this is one of the few books worth its price) and then pickup the 1st edition for cheap/free from somewhere. Try for Used/Secondhand copies to save money.

There is a lot to learn from the book; all of them necessary for a beginner to connect the dots and get the full picture. So don't get stuck on any one chapter/problem but make sure to cover all the chapters in sequence skipping over unnecessary details in the first couple of passes. As an example you don't need to know the nitty-gritty of PIC/GOTs/PLTs/Assembly minutiae etc. in the beginning but just understand the concepts of Relocatable code and Executable vs. Shared Object files.

>Should I continue working on low level projects and hopefully they are good enough, or there are other approaches?

The way i had done this in the past was to really learn the language well (today you will also have a GitHub repo of projects to show), practice algorithms/data structures/interview questions in C/C++ and finally, understand the tight coupling between C/C++ and underlying OS i.e. "Systems Programming". This is the preparation phase.

In the execution phase, you contact companies/recruiters/friends/anybody at all with suitable openings and make it very clear that you really really want the job even if it means taking a pay cut i.e. Salary/Money should not be the goal. Make it clear and open that you are looking for a break into that domain and you are willing to put in any Time and Effort reqd. Finally, try smaller companies rather than big ones at first; their requirements are less strict.

HTH

https://www.nand2tetris.org/

https://nandgame.com/

After this, start learning C. There will be a bunch of semantics to learn, which are all important, however with every small program that you write , you should generate the assembly code with gdb, and aim to understand what the assembly is doing (calling convention for functions, registers, syscalls, e.t.c). This will

Then, figure out how linking and loading works (i.e turning assembly code into the shape of an executable understood by the OS). Objdump and readelf are going to be your friends, as well as getting familiar with gdb debugger.

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/tag/linkers-and-loaders.

This will give you a good foundation for low level development. You can then branch off to other areas like CUDA/OpenCL/AVX programming, microcontroller programming, kernel development, e.t.c