systems programming
n.
The development and management of programs that are a part of an operating system.
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The development and management of programs that are a part of an operating system.
For more information on systems programming, visit Britannica.com.
Systems programming (or system programming) is the activity of programming system software. The primary distinguishing characteristic of systems programming when compared to application programming is that application programming aims to produce software which provides services to the user (e.g. word processor), whereas systems programming aims to produce software which provides services to the computer hardware (e.g. disk defragmenter). It also requires a greater degree of hardware awareness.
In system programming more specifically:
Systems programming is sufficiently different from application programming that programmers tend to specialize in one or the other.
In system programming, often limited programming facilities are available. The use of automatic garbage collection is not common and debugging is sometimes hard to do. The runtime library, if available at all, is usually far less powerful, and does less error checking. Because of those limitations, monitoring and logging are often used; operating systems may have extremely elaborate logging subsystems.
Implementing certain parts in operating system and networking requires systems programming (for example implementing Paging (Virtual Memory) or a device driver for an operating system).
Originally systems programmers invariably wrote in assembly language. Experiments with hardware support in high-level languages in the late 1960s led to such languages as BLISS and BCPL, but C, helped by the growth of UNIX, became ubiquitous in the 1980s. More recently [[Embedded C++]] has seen some use, for instance in the I/O Kit drivers of Mac OS X.
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![]() | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more | |
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