The C Programming Language #

If you want to teach systems, don’t drum up the programmers, sort the issues, and make PRs.
Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless C. - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (With edits)

Note: This chapter is long and goes into a lot of detail. Feel free to gloss over parts with which you have experience in.

C is the de-facto programming language to do serious system serious programming. Why? Most kernels have their API accessible through C. The Linux kernel¹ and the XNU kernel² of which MacOS is based on are written in C and have C API - Application Programming Interface. The Windows Kernel uses C++, but doing system programming on that is much harder on windows that UNIX for novice system programmers. C doesn’t have abstractions like classes and Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII) to clean up memory. C also gives you much more of an opportunity to shoot yourself in the foot, but it lets you do things at a much more fine-grained level.