CSLearning

Various notes and solutions to exercises for some computer science learning that I am trying to catch up on.

A lot of this is focused on native code, including assembly. I am unfortunately interested in Windows assembly for the time being but I am looking at Linux and M1 Mac as well.

There is also a good amount of stuff that's type theory and classical computer science - including material from Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming and the Graham/Knuth/Patashnik book Concrete Mathematics.

Requirements

To run everything you will need Windows, and in particular

• Windows 10 with Visual Studio Command Line Tools (in particular MSVC)
• WSL2 (Debian)
• PowerShell Core
• NASM (some assembly programs are actually MASM, which should be included with MSVC)
• gcc
• Chez Scheme
• Idris (1 currently, hoping to port to 2 ASAP)
• LaTeX

Much of this software (particularly GCed bits like Scheme and Idris) is safe for Linux and OSX. The table of contents below indicates with [POSIX] which components are POSIX-compatible.

There is some assembly written for the M1 Mac ARM processor, which is poorly tested until Apple fixes an SSD issue :(

Overview / table of contents

• Anderson - Operating Systems [POSIX - almost all text, some portable C]
  • Website for the text
• Hall/Slonka - Assembly Programming and Computer Architecture for Software Engineers
  • (Website for the text)
  • Partially POSIX, some MASM and Windows-specific assembly. It is mostly designed for WSL.
• Learn Raytracing in one weekend (link to website)
• The Art of Computer Programming [POSIX]
  • Notes and exercises are written in LaTeX
  • Link to Knuth's personal page
  • This project includes a homespun MIX emulator and MIXAL interpreter here
    • Requirements: a C compiler (I tried to make it portable) and a POSIX terminal (I developed using Windows Terminal)
  • NOTE: If you're going through TAoCP yourself then I think it's worthwhile to write your own MIX system. If you need a MIX system for another reason then you should use GNU MDK or another high-quality application
• The Graphics Programming Blackbook for x64 Windows (link to original 16-bit PDF)
• Agner Fog's technical manuals on optimizing x86 software (link to Fog's website)
• Miscellaneous
  • Some introductory SSE/AVX/etc exercises [POSIX but obviously conditionally portable]
• The Graphics Programming Black Book, translated to x64 windows
• Concrete Mathematics [POSIX - the real selling point here is that it's an Idris package tested on Windows :)]4
• Some of Abdulaziz Ghuloum's work on teaching incremental compiler construction
  • Main paper here.
  • His compiler was in Scheme, but I translated and expanded things in Idris to explore verified compiler construction and dependently-typed manipulations of x64 assembly.

Troubleshooting

Sometimes I had issues with Windows 10 updates screwing up linkers, particularly for 64-bit NASM programs.