Figuring things out is therapeutic in a way. I’ve been working on these four projects for about a month and a bit in total, from the first commit on the first project to the time I am writing this.

C is simple but elegant, powerful language. It’s why I love it so much. I’ve reached the limit where I actually look forward to and enjoy writing it, it’s been my favorite language with good reason.

C++ in general is great, standard library? Not too much. One thing worse than writing C++ is writing C++ cope, sorry Rust. Python? Please, add a way to enforce the existing type system. If dynamic languages like Python contained an enforced type system, JITting or compiling outright would be so so simple. Writing Go? It’s a bit of an identity crisis, compiling code for native speed but also including a garbage collector? No thank you, I’ll take reference counting instead (I might do a piece on RC in the future). V? It’s pretty good, very promising and extremely portable. It does take a bit more tweaking as it does contain an optional garbage collector (I am waiting for autofree’s debut).

I love simplicity and control, C does that for me.

Anyway, here are some core topics I have come to learn through these four projects!

Speeding Up malloc With Fixed Size Allocation (lmalloc)

• Slab Allocation
• Linked Lists
• Shared Libraries (.dll for WIN and .so for NIX)
• Replacing libc Functionality
• The ‘mmap’ system call

Huffman Coding and Dynamic Strings

• Dynamic Arrays
• Dynamic Bit Arrays
• Min Heap
• Binary Trees
• Serializing Data Structures
• Relative Pointers

HTTP Web Server In C With Sockets

• The HTTP 1.0 Protocol
• POSIX Sockets
• Circular/Ring Buffers
• Event Loop Spawning Threads
• Thread Safe Functions With Mutexes
• Splitting By Delimiters In The String Library
• ‘sprintf’ For A String Builder

Rendering The Mandelbrot Set Inside 16 Bit Bootsector Code

• 16 Bit Assembly And C Code
• BIOS Interrupts
• x86 Segmented Addressing
• Linker Scripts
• Extreme Compiler Optimisations
• Complete VGA Graphics Suite
• Floating Point Arithmetic On The x87 FPU