2.6. Recap on chapter 2

This concludes chapter 2, which was rather long and introduced a lot of important concepts for systems programming. While going into more detail on these topics will be postponed to the upcoming chapters, this chapter is very important from a conceptual point of view. Systems programming is a special discipline which draws on a lot of different ideas, both from an applied programming standpoint as well as from a more theoretical point of view. As a recap, try to answer the following questions using what you have learned in this chapter:

• What are ahead-of-time compiled languages? Why do we prefer them for systems programming over interpreted languages?
• What is a programming paradigm? What common programming paradigms do popular programming languages use? Which ones are relevant to systems programming, and why? How do C++ and Rust differ in terms of their programming paradigms?
• What is the difference between statically typed languages and dynamically typed languages? How does static typing play together with ahead-of-time compilation? Why do we consider static typing a good thing for systems programming?
• What does resource ownership mean? Why is it important for systems programming?
• What does polymorphism mean? Why is it important for systems programming (or programming in general)? How does the C++ approach for polymorphism differ from the Rust approach for polymorphism?