2 posts tagged with "Systems Programming"

Last week, a junior developer at my company asked me which operating system they should use for web development. This seemingly simple question led to a thoughtful discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of different operating systems for software development. As developers, our choice of OS significantly impacts our productivity, workflow, and even the types of projects we can efficiently work on.

In this post, I'll compare the major operating systems from a developer's perspective. Having worked extensively with Windows, macOS, and various Linux distributions throughout my career, I'll share insights on when each excels and where they fall short.

It was 2 AM, and I was staring at yet another segmentation fault in our C++ codebase. The issue? A subtle memory ownership problem buried deep in our threading logic. After spending hours with Valgrind and GDB, I finally tracked down the culprit: a classic use-after-free bug that only manifested under heavy load.

That was three years ago. Last week, I completed a similar multi-threaded component in Rust, and despite my best efforts to break it with stress testing, it remains rock solid. The compiler caught my potential race conditions and memory issues before the code even ran.

This stark contrast is why I believe Rust is steadily replacing C++ for new systems programming projects. It's not happening overnight—C++ has a 40-year head start and billions of lines of existing code—but the shift is undeniable.