赖洪礼的 blog
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Starting next Thursday, I’ll be a student assistant for the course Operating Systems at my university. What’s that you say? Well, my job is to aid the students during practicum sessions, thereby reducing the amount of work for the professors.
This course is about operating system design, and it has a strong focus on POSIX operating systems. It talks about things like CPU scheduling, system calls, multiprocessing, filesystems, memory, etc. During the practicum sessions, students have to program in C. Last year I noticed that a lot of students have a hard time understanding C. C is not officially taught as a course at my university; students are only taught Java. The jump from Java to C is pretty big even though the syntax is somewhat similar, and most people have trouble understanding pointers, memory management and even include files and the nature of linking. On top of that, most students are unfamiliar with Linux, which is the operating system we use during practicum sessions.
Now, I happen to be one of the few students who knew both C and Linux, and last year (when I was still attending the course) I was like a walking API reference.
“Hey Hongli why does this code crash?”
“Help Hongli it won’t compile!”
“Hongli what the hell is ‘makes pointer from integer without cast’ supposed to mean?”
“OMG Hongli strlen() is eating my baby!”

Well, no more. I’m a student assistant now, so this time I can actually tell them “RTFM” (= read the sheets/book/man pages) if they ask me trivial things. I know that some people will have questions about how to compile multiple .c files to a single executable, so I prepared diagram:

If students don’t understand this then I’ll dance Hare Hare Yukai 20 times in a crowded place.