• Storage of information in computer memories, including:

  • Bits and their significance

  • Differing interpretations of bits as numbers characters, etc

  • Encodings of C language types on AMD 64 architectures including both unsigned and signed (two's complement) representations; floating-point representations, etc.

  • Bit masking operations, use of flags, and packing of multiple values into a single word

  • Conversions between hex, binary and decimal representations

  • Big endian and little endian storage conventions: you should be able to explain the differences, and to predict the bytes that will actually be stored, e.g. for some given integer or float

• Interfaces and abstraction: why they are important, and programming techniques for implementing them

  • Use of void pointers and incomplete structures for information hiding and abstraction

  • Hansons's conventions for interface and ADT programming

  • Polymorphism, including boxed and unboxed representations

• Invariants and why they matter

• The representation of programs in memory

  • Code (text) segments, static initialized and uninitialized data, heap, stack, etc.

• The phases of program building: preprocessing, compilation, assembing, linking, etc. and how they work to create an executable program

• Locality and caching

Assembler programming for x86-64 (AMD 64)

Emulation and the Universal Machine

Refactoring to improve code structure

• Performance and optimization

  • Strategies for testing

  • Valgrind

  • qcachegrind