Jimmy.Castiel @BenjaminP93

a professor at Illinois got frustrated with existing systems programming textbooks so he started a wikibook project and had students help write it it covers C, processes, threads, synchronization, memory allocation, networking, filesystems, scheduling and security

A French engineer who lives quietly in Paris has spent 30 years writing software that the entire internet now runs on without knowing his name. He wrote the code that streams every YouTube video, every Netflix show, every TikTok clip. He wrote the code that runs the virtual servers underneath AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. He calculated more digits of pi than anyone in history. He has no Twitter. He has no marketing. He just keeps shipping. His name is Fabrice Bellard. Here is the story, because almost nobody outside the systems programming world knows what one man has built. Fabrice was born in 1972 in Grenoble, France. He studied at École Polytechnique, the top French engineering school. He never went to Silicon Valley. He never built a startup empire. He just wrote code. In 2000 he started a project called FFmpeg, an open-source multimedia framework for encoding, decoding, and streaming video. He was 28. The project did one thing nobody else had done well. It handled every video and audio format that existed, in one library, on every operating system. He led it himself for years. Today FFmpeg is the invisible engine of the internet. YouTube uses it. Netflix uses it. VLC uses it. Chrome and Firefox use parts of it. Every Android phone, every iPhone, every smart TV, every video editing tool you have ever touched runs FFmpeg somewhere underneath. If you have watched a video on a screen in the last 20 years, Fabrice's code processed it. He was not done. In 2003 he started QEMU, a machine emulator and virtualizer. He wrote it solo until version 0.7.1 in 2005. QEMU lets you run any operating system on any other operating system. It became the foundation of modern virtualization. KVM, the Linux kernel hypervisor, runs on top of QEMU. Every major cloud provider, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, runs virtual machines on infrastructure built around it. The Quick Emulator is the most cited piece of cloud infrastructure code on Earth. He kept going. In 2001 he won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest with a small C compiler that grew into TCC, the Tiny C Compiler. TCC can compile and boot a Linux kernel from source in under 15 seconds. In 2004 he calculated the most digits of pi ever computed at the time, using a personal desktop computer and an algorithm he derived himself called Bellard's formula. In 2011 he wrote a complete PC emulator in pure JavaScript that runs Linux in your browser, a project called JSLinux that engineers still cannot believe is real. In 2019 he released QuickJS, a small but complete JavaScript engine that fits where V8 cannot. In 2021 he released NNCP, a neural network based lossless data compressor that immediately took the lead on the Large Text Compression Benchmark. Then he turned his attention to large language models. He built TextSynth Server, a web server with a REST API for running LLMs locally. He released ts_zip and ts_sms, compression utilities that use language models to compress text and short messages at ratios traditional algorithms cannot reach. He released TSAC, a very low bitrate audio compression system. In December 2025 he released Micro QuickJS, a new JavaScript engine for microcontrollers, separate from QuickJS, designed for environments with almost no memory. Fabrice co-founded a telecom company called Amarisoft in 2012, where he serves as CTO. Amarisoft builds 4G and 5G base station software used by carriers and labs around the world. He has been running it for over a decade while continuing to ship personal projects from his own home page at bellard dot org He has no Twitter. He has no Instagram. He gives almost no interviews. His personal website is a flat list of projects with no styling, no fonts, no marketing copy. Just titles and links. A quiet French engineer who never moved to Silicon Valley wrote the code that quietly runs the internet. He is still shipping.

How your PC manages memory from 8088's 1MB limit to modern systems. Prof. Chester Rebeiro.

What every programmer should know about memory Still one of the most goated reads

in 1988 Jack Crenshaw wrote Let's Build a Compiler because most compiler books were impossible for beginners to follow in 2017 Nora Sandler did something similar for C while working through Abdulaziz Ghuloum's paper on incremental compiler construction she adapted the ideas from Scheme to C the series starts with a compiler that can do exactly one thing return an integer from main then adds one feature at a time until it becomes a real compiler generating x86 64 assembly the entire series is free online it eventually became a 750 page No Starch Press book in 2024 the original blog posts are still available and still work as a step by step guide

x86 segmentation maps memory references through segment registers. It is still used in modern x86-64 for FS/GS, especially thread-local storage and kernel per-CPU data. In sandboxing, segmentation can restrict untrusted code to a fixed memory region. MIT 6.858.

if you want to write an operating system from scratch this is the wiki almost everyone ends up using the OSDev community has been building it since 2004 it covers everything from the first bootloader instruction to writing filesystems memory managers and drivers the articles include real code you can compile and run yourself the Bare Bones tutorial gets you to a kernel that boots and prints to the screen in around 100 lines from there the wiki walks through every major piece of a real operating system

a C compiler once appeared to disprove Fermat’s Last Theorem Fermat’s Last Theorem says no integers satisfy a³ + b³ = c³. proven by Andrew Wiles in 1995 after 358 years. then John Regehr showed a loop compiled with gcc -O2 that printed: "Fermat's Last Theorem has been disproved." it was not math, it was undefined behavior.

a professor at Illinois got frustrated with existing systems programming textbooks so he started a wikibook project and had students help write it it covers C, processes, threads, synchronization, memory allocation, networking, filesystems, scheduling and security all in one free PDF it eventually became the official textbook for CS 241 at UIUC with more than 1000 students taking the course every year written for people who already know how to code and want to understand what actually happens underneath

Redis does not use C strings antirez wrote a custom string library called SDS: Simple Dynamic Strings it later became a standalone library C strings had three problems Redis could not accept - strlen is O(n) because it scans until the null terminator - strcat needs manual capacity management and often scans the string again internally - and C strings cannot safely store arbitrary binary data because null bytes end the string SDS fixes all of this by storing metadata in a header placed right before the string buffer

"Advanced Calculus" is a free book of more than 500 pages published by the Harvard Mathematics Department and represents a real gold mine for the study of mathematical analysis. It covers normed vector spaces, compactness and completeness, multivariable differential calculus, integration, differential equations, multilinear forms, differentiable manifolds, exterior calculus, potential theory, and classical mechanics. It is a mathematically substantial book, rigorous yet accessible to readers with a solid background in analysis and linear algebra. Despite its advanced level, it maintains remarkable clarity and develops the theory in a progressive and coherent way. It is one of those resources worth keeping in your mathematical toolbox, useful not only for mathematicians but also for those working in physics, mechanics, engineering, data science, and computer science, where many of the concepts developed in the text find direct applications. people.math.harvard.edu/~shlomo/docs/A…

another day. another github down/outages. So this is what replacing human workers with AI bots looks like? 🤡

Linux Device Drivers is still one of the best reads if you want to understand how the kernel talks to hardware. You'll want some C and basic Unix syscall knowledge, but the examples make it easy to just go through and start learning.

FatGid+4 : A four-byte type, an eight-byte stride, one root shell. FreeBSD 14.x kernel local privilege escalation via setcred(2) fatgid.io

a Stanford professor named Nick Parlante spent years writing short focused documents on C and put them all free online Essential C is ~ 45 pages covering all the common features and techniques for the C language he wrote at the bottom: "I hope you can share and enjoy this document in the spirit of goodwill in which it is given away" that was in 2003 and it has been free ever since

The Equinox 100 was an obscure 1970s microcomputer sold by a company called “Parasitic Engineering”. A couple of years earlier, MITS released the Altair 8800 (widely considered the first commercially successful hobbyist microcomputer). MITS sold the main Altair kit at nearly break-even prices, expecting to make their real profits selling add-on expansion boards. Instead, third-party companies started making cheaper, better-engineered expansion boards for the Altair. The furious co-founder of MITS, Ed Roberts, wrote an angry piece in his corporate newsletter deriding these third-party vendors as "parasite companies." Howard Fullmer and Gene Nardi, two computer nerds from UC Berkeley, thought that was funny and founded Parasitic Engineering. Initially they were making hardware fix-kits to solve the noisy power supplies and clock issues on the Altair. By 1977, Parasitic Engineering had moved beyond Altair repair kits and expansion boards into selling microcomputers systems under the “Equinox” name. Featuring an octal keypad interface instead of traditional toggle switches, the Equinox 100 was their attempt to offer a more integrated and polished alternative to the chaotic build-it-yourself systems of the early hobbyist era. Add from BYTE 1977

Minimal System Requirements

A group of developers tried rebuilding Windows from scratch. Without Microsoft’s code. 🤯 They called it ReactOS. 🖥️ > Started in 1996 as FreeWin95. > Goal: make Windows free and open source. > Developers argued for years about the design. > Barely wrote any actual code. > Scrapped everything and restarted in 1998. > Renamed the project ReactOS. > Built as a reaction to Microsoft’s monopoly. > Designed to look like Windows XP. > Start menu. Taskbar. File Explorer. > Almost identical to real Windows. > But the real goal was much crazier. > Binary compatibility. > Meaning real Windows .exe files should just run. > No emulators. No virtual machines. > Firefox worked. LibreOffice worked. Adobe Reader worked. > But there was one huge problem. > They couldn’t legally copy Microsoft’s code. > One developer studied Windows behavior. > Another developer rewrote it from scratch. > A process called clean-room engineering. > Extremely slow. Extremely difficult. > Nearly 30 years later… > 300 contributors. > 15 million lines of code. > ReactOS is still in alpha today. Most open-source projects replace apps. ReactOS tried replacing Windows itself. 🔥

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Brian Kernighan was one of the three original authors of ‘awk’ (stands for Aho – Weinberger – Kernighan) developed in 1977 at Bell Labs. Kernighan, Aho, and Weinberger set out to develop a small interpreted language for text pattern scanning and reporting, essentially a scripting language for processing of structured text data. The development of awk was driven by the Unix philosophy, functionally filling a niche between simpler tools such as grep and sed and general-purpose programming languages like C. awk provided a powerful, high-level scripting language for data processing, filtering, and transformation. A decade later, Larry Wall took these ideas to the next level with Perl, creating a general-purpose scripting language that preserved the spirit of awk-style pattern scanning while adding more extensive string manipulation and scripting capabilities. awk art by @b0rk