[coldtea]

"System software includes software categories such as operating systems, utility software, device drivers, compilers, and linkers"

Most of those things can be summed up as "operating systems" (operating system, device drivers, and utility software, e.g. basic backend services) plus some essential supporting stuff (compiler and linker).

So, yeah, it's pretty much constrained to "operating systems" and the few essential items. It's not about network servers the kind Go is used for.

[mindcrime]

In my experience, pvg is correct. It's been ages since "systems programming" was limited to just "operating systems" from what I can see. I don't know anybody who wouldn't refer to writing middleware or network servers as "systems programming".

[pvg]

So it's not constrained to operating systems but it's pretty much constrained to operating systems. You can see how I'm less than convinced.

It's just not a precisely defined technical term and in a computer language really has more to do with the intent and purpose of the designers and implementors and the operational context than things like 'has manual memory management' or 'must be used for writing an actual operating system'. By your strange definition, writing an NFS server would not be 'systems programming' because for some reason networking is excluded. I don't find this seemingly arbitrary distinction convincing either.

[coldtea]

>So it's not constrained to operating systems but it's pretty much constrained to operating systems. You can see how I'm less than convinced.

It's just that operating systems is not just the kernel. The POSIX userland of tools (ls, cat, ps, etc) are also systems programming, and essential part of an OS. And of course device drivers (which they even get linked or loaded directly to the kernel).

Postgres, Varnish, redis, or Apache on the other hand, or some ad-hoc enterprise backend service, is not "systems programming".

>* By your strange definition, writing an NFS server would not be 'systems programming' because for some reason networking is excluded.*

Never said that "networking is exclude". The TCP/IP stack is very much systems programming, as an example. And NFS would be too, as it's still a kind of filesystem (and thus working with the kernel and OS at a low level), and an essential part of a POSIX system.

Some load balancer for MySQL, on the other hand (one of Go's touted examples), not that much.

[pvg]

The definition of 'systems programming' is certainly wooly (and predates all of your examples) but I don't think it's an iterative stochastic hairsplitting fractal, like you're proposing. You've basically argued your way to a corner in which varnish and apache are not 'systems programming'. That's not a sensible use of the term.

[coldtea]

If Apache is "systems programming" then why not one of the various web servers written in Lua or Python or whatever?

Are those then "systems programming languages" too?

[pvg]

Nope.

[danellis]

But is the activity of writing a web server in Lua or Python system programming?

[nickpsecurity]

Systems are relationships between input from the environment, algorithms/functions to process it, and output to the environment. Basically programs at a high-level representation. Systems analysis, design, and implementation started with basic control systems far as I can tell. At some point, there was a distinction between "systems" and "application" programming made by whoever. Original meaning of the term covered all programming where you then picked tools (eg languages) best suited for particular task.

Go's predecessors... Oberon-2, C, and Limbo... were two languages for OS's plus a distributed, systems language. Go's core is the first two with last being mainly for concurrency IIRC. That with ability to do unsafe stuff makes me think of Go as a systems language used mainly for regular applications.