What is systems programming?

Systems programming is a special area of programming on Unix machines. Note that systems programming is not limited to Unix machines: it is just that this book deals with the Unix operating system only. Most commands that have to do with system administration tasks, such as disk formatting, network interface configuration, module loading, and kernel performance tracking, are implemented using the techniques of systems programming. Additionally, the /etc directory, which can be found on all Unix systems, contains plain text files that deal with the configuration of a Unix machine and its services and are also manipulated using systems software.

You can group the various areas of systems software and related system calls in the following sets:

• File I/O: This area deals with file reading and writing operations, which is the most important task of an operating system. File input and output must be fast and efficient, and above all, reliable.
• Advanced file I/O: Apart from the basic input and output system calls, there are also more advanced ways to read or write to a file including asynchronous I/O and non-blocking I/O.
• System files and configuration: This group of system software includes functions that allow you to handle system files, such as /etc/passwd, and get system specific information, such as system time and DNS configuration.
• Files and directories: This cluster includes functions and system calls that allow the programmer to create and delete directories and get information such as the owner and the permissions of a file or a directory.
• Process control: This group of software allows you to create and interact with Unix processes.
• Threads: When a process has multiple threads, it can perform multiple tasks. However, threads must be created, terminated, and synchronized, which is the purpose of this collection of functions and system calls.
• Server processes: This set includes techniques that allow you to develop server processes, which are processes that get executed in the background without the need for an active terminal. Go is not that good at writing server processes in the traditional Unix way: but let me explain this a little more. Unix servers such as Apache use fork(2) to create one or more child processes (this process is called forking and refers to cloning the parent process into a child process) and continue executing the same executable from the same point, and most importantly, sharing memory. Although Go does not offer an equivalent to the fork(2) function, this is not an issue because you can use goroutines to cover most of the uses of fork(2).
• Interprocess communication: This set of functions allows processes that run on the same Unix machine to communicate with each other using features such as pipes, FIFOs, message queues, semaphores, and shared memory.
• Signal processing: Signals offer processes a way of handling asynchronous events, which can be very handy. Almost all server processes have extra code that allows them to handle Unix signals using the system calls of this group.
• Network programming: This is the art of developing applications that work over computer networks with the help of TCP/IP and is not systems programming per se. However, most TCP/IP servers and clients are dealing with system resources, users, files, and directories. So, most of the time, you cannot create network applications without doing some kind of systems programming.

The challenging thing with systems programming is that you cannot afford to have an incomplete program; you can either have a fully working, secure program that can be used on a production system or nothing at all. This mainly happens because you cannot trust end users and hackers. The key difficulty in systems programming is the fact that an erroneous system call can make your Unix machine misbehave or, even worse, crash!

Most security issues on Unix systems usually come from wrongly implemented systems software because bugs in systems software can compromise the security of an entire system. The worst part is that this can happen many years after using a certain piece of software.

Back when Unix was first introduced, the only way to write systems software was using C; nowadays, you can program systems software using programming languages including Go, which will be the subject of this book.

You should understand that the two main benefits you get from using a programming language other than C for developing systems software are as follows:

• Using a modern programming language along with its tools
• Simplicity, as you usually have to write, debug, and maintain less code

Apart from Go, other good candidates for developing system tools are Python, Perl, Rust, and Ruby.