What is System Programming?

System Programming is one of the best techniques to be a master in the field of Computer Science. System Programming is a place where all of your core Computer Science subjects are really put into test; be it data structures, algorithms or complexity. Learning system programming helps not only to have an in depth understanding of how your operating system works, but also design and develop best performing applications. A system programmer delves into depth whenever his/her program crashes and is easily able to debug the issue.

System Programming involves the study of

1. Process Management
2. Memory Management
3. Filesystem
4. Input/Output
5. Network Programming

A person who masters these is really an expert. Check the upcoming posts related to this topic. C is a perfect choice of system programming. But it doesn’t mean that it is not possible to do system programming in other languages.

System programming is writing programs which directly make use of various system calls provided by the Operating System. Operating system provides a lot of functionality which are exposed by system calls. Just like the API(Application Programming Interface) provided by various websites. Just like API helps to make use of the service provided by the website, system calls are exposed by OS to expose its services.

The next question will be what are the services provided by an Operating System. All your applications are able to run because of these services. As you are aware, a computer consists of various resources like monitor, keyboard, mouse, memory and printer. It is because of the effective management of these resources by the OS that your system is working fool-proof.

Let’s see an overview of services

• Creation, Deletion, Edition, Renaming of Files
• Telling an application that you have pressed a key or moved the mouse.
• Display of various windows

All the above can be put into some or the other section discussed above. We will look more about these in the upcoming posts

Tags: Application Programming Interface, Computer programming, Computer Science, Input/output, Language, Memory management, Operating system, Programming