This is a step forward. I've been pushing for more language safety for what, decades, and it's good to see Stanford teaching it. It's important that students understand ownership concepts, because they exist in C, but the language doesn't give you any help in dealing with ownership. For years, I've been saying about C that the big questions are "how big is it?", "who deletes it?", and "who locks it?". Rust addresses all of those. So teaching Rust is useful to get students thinking in the right direction. Even if they get stuck maintaining old C code.

Looking ahead, new students are going to have to deal in future with huge numbers of CPU cores. So they need to deal with large numbers of threads. That's very hard to do well. This class addresses not just safety, but performance. That's good.

This is so far ahead of what I got from Stanford in 1985.

(I have some arguments with the Rust people, mostly around over-use of "unsafe" and too much language churn, but they're doing great work.)

Just FYI, Stanford also has a class on parallel programming (which I TA'd at one point). This goes into GPU and distributed programming as well as multi-core. Slides are online though I guess lecture recordings are not: http://cs149.stanford.edu

One aspect of systems programming that doesn't get enough attention involves tracing memory leaks (with valgrind, massif, etc). While it may be challenging for you to create realistic examples, doing so would help expose students to challenges they'll face in the real world.

That's a great suggestion! I'll try to design some exercises for the next time we teach this.

I may be misunderstanding, but it appears that the code for the assignments is in a private GitHub repo that students of the class are invited to. Is there any other way to gain access?

I'm happy to email it to you! My email's at the bottom of the blog post. I'm also working on getting that starter code posted publicly.

EDIT: the code is now posted here: https://github.com/reberhardt7/cs110l-spr-2020-starter-code

Thank you! Finally going to take a stab at rust, glad to have some direction in that endeavor.

Great work Ryan! Love to see macros get their own lecture.

- your fellow 110 TA (and 240 TA I guess)

Hi Divya! Thanks for reading!!

Is there any plan of releasing all the videos? Lectures 15-18 do not have videos linked.

Great class, thanks for sharing the materials. Would you consider also making the code for the exercises available? I'm working through the slides but the exercises are hard to follow without the provided source code.

Yes! It's now available here: https://github.com/reberhardt7/cs110l-spr-2020-starter-code

Thanks so much for sharing it.

This looks really cool! I especially love the assignments and I'd definitely take a crack at them. Thanks again!

Thanks for checking it out! I'd love to hear any feedback once you look through them