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What Is Systems Programming, Really?
71–80 of 93 posts
Re: What Is Systems Programming, Really?
#72Hacker News is a site where someone corrects a slight error in a parent comment which then leads us down a bottomless rabbit hole that gets further and further away from the general point of the original post. Hacker News is a honeypot for people on the autism/aspergers spectrum. What is the color of chartreuse?
Re: What Is Systems Programming, Really?
#73I don't think a single definition makes any sense now: decades ago you may have had a definition of a 'computer system' that describes every big program. Nowadays there are many sets of requirements depending on context, each set of requirements implies its own constraints on memory management and scheduling so that there is no one description of how a complex program would look like.
Re: What Is Systems Programming, Really?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems a bit telling that you described one as "kernel" systems programming and the other as "system" systems programming.
Well, I think the distinction is fair, kernel systems programming is largely concerned with things a kernel would normally do (ie, a kernel or µC code), very close to the metal or such. Maybe bare metal systems programming would have been more accurate but I feel it doesn't convey the same meaning. System systems programming is what it says on the tin; it's about constructing systems, multiple objects interacting wit…
I think that in user space, it is not clear what is an application and what is a subsystem. Is a database a system or an application? I could issue queries to it directly as part of some ad-hoc research, or I could build a production process using it as a component. In one use-case, it's the application, and in the other, it's just a subsystem. And so I think the distinction between kernel-space and user-space is the only one that makes sense. Once you're in user-space, the distinction between systems and applications can no longer be applied to a tool, but only to particular use-cases for that tool.
Re: What Is Systems Programming, Really?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Different goals. Chapel is a strongly typed language designed from the ground up to replace C++ and Fortran for HPC programming in cluster environments, while removing the typical unsafe features from C and C++. Initially designed by Cray, Intel has also given an helping hand. My experience is only from language geek point of view, reading the papers. Chapel Implementers and Users Workshop 2018 papers https://chapel-…
> strongly typed language designed from the ground up to replace C++ and Fortran for HPC programming ... sounds like Julia to me ... > ... in cluster environments this is where it may be differentiating itself, AFAIK Julia has not been very focused on clustering from start, but I'm assuming it's now getting better.
Julia works great on clusters, I use it all the time. It's learning a lot from Chapel too. Chapel has an amazing parallelism model, and a lot of Julia's parallelism is learning from it, including the near future hierarchical task-based multithreading. Julia was designed for interactive usage that can generate fast code, while Chapel was designed for the more traditional HPC usage. With more and more people using interactive languages on the HPC to avoid the translation step of the two-language problem though, Julia seems to be eating into the domain where more hardcore people used to write C++ and Fortran with MPI (I was one of those for a bit!). But while "no need to rewrite code, just take your interactive script and throw it on the cluster" is right for some, other applications will want a statically compiled language with a strong parallelism model which is Chapel.
The issue I see with Chapel though is that HPC is such a small community compared to larger scientific computing, and Julia has such a good design that it is very easy to improve (using Julia code!) with a large developer group (currently 736 contributors, that is quite a bit more than CPython has ever had and Julia is a lot younger), Julia is a lot more nimble. So when Chapel gets a good idea, sure enough there's an MIT programming languages or HPC fellow who proposes it in Julia, and so you get stuff like https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/22631 soon after. That doesn't mean Chapel is bad, but Julia already has the largest contributor base of any of the open source scientific computing languages still being developed, and that manpower is definitely useful for keeping up with the current research trends (working on Julia is a good way to get a math/CS PhD at MIT :) )
Re: What Is Systems Programming, Really?
#76A systems programming language can run on bare hardware by itself, or nearly so. It is acceptable to require a very small amount of assembly code, for example to implement something like memcpy or bcopy, or to provide atomic operations. A language is disqualified if it requires an OS or if it requires code written in a different non-assembly language. Cheating, by adding that as a huge (impractical) amount of assembl…
So then C is cheating by your definition, because it is impossible to implement ANSI C standard library without using Assembly or compiler extensions.
I did say a small amount of assembly was fine. By "cheating", I mean something like converting the perl interpreter to assembly code and claiming that perl thus doesn't require code written in some other language.
Leaving out libraries is normal for a systems programming language. It is fine unless the language entirely doesn't work without the libraries.
Re: What Is Systems Programming, Really?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> strongly typed language designed from the ground up to replace C++ and Fortran for HPC programming ... sounds like Julia to me ... > ... in cluster environments this is where it may be differentiating itself, AFAIK Julia has not been very focused on clustering from start, but I'm assuming it's now getting better.
Hasn't Julia focus been MATLAB folks mostly? In any case, the more the merrier. :)
A pure Julia program got >1 petaflop on Cori, so it's quite in the HPC realm.
Re: What Is Systems Programming, Really?
#78IDK about systems programming, but one thing I do know:
Systems researchers = ^[AI researchers]
Re: What Is Systems Programming, Really?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I think the distinction is fair, kernel systems programming is largely concerned with things a kernel would normally do (ie, a kernel or µC code), very close to the metal or such. Maybe bare metal systems programming would have been more accurate but I feel it doesn't convey the same meaning. System systems programming is what it says on the tin; it's about constructing systems, multiple objects interacting wit…
I think that in user space, it is not clear what is an application and what is a subsystem. Is a database a system or an application? I could issue queries to it directly as part of some ad-hoc research, or I could build a production process using it as a component. In one use-case, it's the application, and in the other, it's just a subsystem. And so I think the distinction between kernel-space and user-space is the…
a modern RDBMS is largely in the systems layer since it's the glue used by other application.
Having a user interface doesn't really matter IMO, otherwise none of the usermode systems programming applications would be systems programming at all.
Perhaps it would help to add that user software applications generally aren't intended to be used by other applications. Your browser is such an application since it's primary interface is being directly used by the user. The output and state of a browser is not intended to be consumed by other applications running on the system, though it is capable of running code to supplement the output and state of a single website for the purpose of further user interfacing.
An RDBMS doesn't have such a thing, the user interface is largely what you use in the application, it's primary use case is gluing together applications like browsers or websites.
Re: What Is Systems Programming, Really?
#80My idea of system programming is that, other than the "near to the bare metal" element, which may not be always true, has this quality of creating infrastructures for other layers to use. A game 3D engine and a DNS server may be both written in C++ and may use the same low level programming techniques to achieve speed, but the fundamental difference is that one is just part of an application program of some type, and…
Computer systems are only useful because they can run application programs. "Systems programming," therefore, is one that aims to improve the utility of the computer, as opposed to "application programming" which solves concrete problems posed by users.
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