Ask HN: How to learn proper systems programming?

Years ago I modified the Postgresql source code (8.xx).

It's something I was terrified of doing.

But once I got in there and started poking around, I realized it was just ordinary plain-vanilla C code. Not C++. Just C code.

With my local copy, I started to hack pg_dump to do something special that we wanted at the time. Even after 30 years of coding, I'm not that especially good of a programmer. But I ended up getting our own special version of pg_dump that did what we wanted at the time and it went into production dumping hundreds of gigs of data every day!

But what I'm not, is afraid. I'm not afraid to try anything.

And that's what it takes to do deep, systems level programming.

Don't be afraid.

Those bits are just bits. And it's just code... and most of it was not written by wizards. Just ordinary people like you and me. Don't be afraid man.

Clone the repo and setup a workable build environment and start tinkering and compiling and running to see what happens.

You would be totally shocked to find out what you can actually achieve.

Those books will only go so far.

Follow-up question: how do I learn systems programming on Windows? I know it’s pretty easy to just set up a Linux VM or use WSL2, and I’m prepared to do that if I must, but it would be even easier if I could work in the same Windows environment I normally use. However, from what I’ve seen, practically all guides to systems programming seem to start off by assuming you’re using Linux.

(And by the way, thanks OP for asking this question! I’ve also been wanting to learn systems programming, but I haven’t gotten around to asking yet. And all the suggested resources look fascinating… there goes my university vacation!)

I basically came here to suggest the same thing. The biggest part is a mental shift: realize that if you find a bug (or feature you'd like to have) in an open source project that you have the ability to fix it.

The rabbit hole of reading code you go down of reading code when you do that is, I believe, the best real introduction to systems programming. Once you've been doing that for a while, you internalize the idioms. I'd recommend large projects because you're less likely to just end up copying some person or couple of people's quirks, and learning to read large codebases is a major skill in itself. The process of submitting patches often turns into ad hoc mentoring, where you'll be told what you didn't get right this go around. After you've done that for a while, you realize the same things apply to other large systems projects, and you end up exposed to a number of different styles of systems stuff.

At the foundation of a Windows System are two layers, the Win32 calls, and the bedrock is the Native API - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_API

You can access them via assembler, C, etc.

KeithS from https://www.assemblytutorial.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/ChibiAkumas/ does introductions to assembly programming on nearly every old microcomputer platform you can think of.