Is learning about operating systems useful for a software developer?

Question

Most of the underlying workings of the operating system is hidden from the programmer. I believe that is also one of the purposes of an operating system. Then what are the reasons a software developer should learn about how operating systems work?

Answer 1

Learning operating systems is very useful.

• know how your threads are scheduled
• know how to run multi threading code
• know how much memory the OS allows you to allocate
• know latency in your IO polling waits
• know how efficient process and threads are switched
• know the latency in the networking code (for example useful for high frequency trading)
• know how your program is paged

And many more I missed

Answer 2

Knowing how operating systems work is a fundamental and critical to anyone who is a serious software developer. There should be no attempt to get around it and anyone telling you it's not necessary should be ignored. While the extent and depth of knowledge needed can be questioned, knowing more than the fundamentals can be critical to how well your program runs and even its structure and flow.

Anything else is a cop out, that is, an attempt to get out of the work.

Why? When you write a program and it runs too slow, but you see nothing wrong with your code, where else will you look for a solution. How will you be able to debug the problem if you don't know how the operating system works? Are you accessing too many files? Running out of memory and swap is in high usage? But you don't even know what swap is! Or is I/O blocking?

And you want to communicate with another machine. How do you do that locally or over the internet? And what's the difference? Why do some programmers prefer one OS over another?

Answer 3

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the operating systems people were learning some painful lessons about concurrency, mutual exclusion, deadlocks, and the problems that arose. This included a bunch of stuff about how to build distributed systems.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the distributed database folks were having to learn the exact same lessons, the hard way, because they didn't bother to read the papers published ten years earlier by the operating systems guys.

This observation came from a professor at UT Austin, near the end of my undergraduate career.

Answer 4

It depends on what kind of development you're doing.

Working on your average, run of the mill, line of business CRUD? Then no. No, you don't really have any need to understand the theory behind an operating system. You're just going to use the OS and not think about how it works.

Working on an embedded microcontroller or a PLC motion controller where there isn't an OS and you're going to want to learn some basics. You're going to need to understand interrupts, thread scheduling techniques (round robin is common, but not necessarily best), amount other things I'm sure I've yet to learn.

Basically, you only need to learn these things when it's not handed to you on a silver platter. However, that's not to say it isn't useful to understand OS theory either. We're knowledge workers. Having more knowledge about the environment we're targeting certainly can't hurt.

Answer 5

Most of the underlying workings of the operating system is hidden from the programmer.

Agreed; Developers doesn't need to know minutiae of of how to read a stream of bytes from the puddles of media on the surface of a magnetic disk device spinning at thousands of revolutions per minute.
That sort of thing is written by someone else; the Developer simply reuses it.

I believe that is also one of the purposes of an operating system.

The purpose of an operating system is to make a system operate - basically to make the computer "work".

What Developers may or may not do with it is only a small consideration, influencing the creation of the APIs used by Developers to access functions provided by the operating system.

Then what are the reasons a software developer should learn about how operating systems work?

If you travel to a foreign country, do you need to know on which side of the road they drive? OK, you can "get by" without this snippet of information, but your journey is likely to be more colourful/ eventful/ problematic/ painful than it might be knowing how to use their roads.

If you're lucky, your programming Framework might insulate from many of these differences, but by no means all of them.