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Questions tagged [low-level]

Questions concerning low-level aspects of a system: programming close to the underlying details and hardware.

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75 votes
11 answers
11k views

Why are cryptic short identifiers still so common in low-level programming?

There used to be very good reasons for keeping instruction / register names short. Those reasons no longer apply, but short cryptic names are still very common in low-level programming. Why is this? ...
Roman Starkov's user avatar
57 votes
11 answers
36k views

Were the first assemblers written in machine code?

I am reading the book The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles, which contains projects encompassing the build of a computer from boolean gates all the way ...
The111's user avatar
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35 votes
13 answers
23k views

Low level programming - what's in it for me? [closed]

For years I have considered digging into what I consider "low level" languages. For me this means C and assembly. However I had no time for this yet, nor has it EVER been neccessary. Now because I ...
back2dos's user avatar
  • 30.1k
22 votes
9 answers
2k views

What are the complexities of memory-unmanaged programming?

Or in other words, what specific problems did automated garbage collection solve? I've never done low-level programming, so I don't know how complicated can freeing resources get. The kind of bugs ...
deprecated's user avatar
  • 3,297
0 votes
2 answers
780 views

Object Oriented Design for chess

Recently I came across some article on Chess OOPS design.Following is some snippet from it: public class Chess { ChessBoard chessBoard; Player[] player; Player currentPlayer; List<...
rahul sharma's user avatar
17 votes
4 answers
8k views

Why do some programmers categorize C, Python, C++ differently? - regarding level

I am taking an introductory course on python and the instructor says that python is a high level language and C and C++ are low level languages. It's just confusing. I thought that C, C++, Python, ...
atheistlearner's user avatar
43 votes
10 answers
16k views

Why not have a High Level Language based OS? Are Low Level Languages more efficient?

Without being presumptuous, I would like you to consider the possibility of this. Most OS today are based on pretty low level languages (mainly C/C++) Even the new ones such as Android uses JNI & ...
rtindru's user avatar
  • 549
12 votes
3 answers
2k views

Why do compilers typically only generate executables for the platform they are installed on?

I'm a C++ developer and in an attempt to better understand cross-platform development, I'm trying to get a better understanding of some implementation details of compilers and how exactly they create ...
Jason's user avatar
  • 469
12 votes
4 answers
1k views

What are the algorithms behind low pause GC?

Some languages, for exemple java, introduced a low pause GC. Those GC can do most of the work without pausing the whole world. This is obviously a quite hard problem because it require to analyze the ...
deadalnix's user avatar
  • 6,023
5 votes
6 answers
8k views

What are memory addresses? [closed]

I have more or less 0 knowledge in low-level topics, so forgive my possible ignorance. I know that in languages such as C, pointers hold 'memory addresses', i.e. strings (or binary data?) written in ...
Aviv Cohn's user avatar
  • 21.5k
1 vote
4 answers
3k views

Why use a higher level language? [closed]

A question that gets asked a lot is "Why use low level languages if you can code in high level languages more easily (and often tersely)?". I think the answers are fairly straight forward here, being ...
Daniel Porteous's user avatar
1 vote
5 answers
1k views

What kinds of low level knowledge matter? [closed]

I realize that this question is similar to Low level programming - what's in it for me, but the answers didn't really address my question well. Part from just an understanding, how exactly does your ...
Peter Smith's user avatar
  • 2,577
0 votes
2 answers
4k views

Are there any languages that have both high- and low-level facilities? [closed]

Are there any languages that have both high- and low-level facilities? If not, is it feasible to create one? Why or why not? In theory, it would be very helpful to have a programming language that ...
Abbafei's user avatar
  • 821