Can it be replaced with Rust nowadays? Is it low-level enough? Or borrow checker and lifetimes defeat the whole purpose?
* How the code is executed on modern hardware and operating systems.
* How various language features might be compiled to assembly
* Memory layouts for things like stack frames, how a simple heap allocator might work, array layouts, layouts for other structures like linked lists, etc.
* The relative cost of various operations and how to write code that is cache friendly.
* How debuggers generally work and how to debug code.
Could these things be taught equally well or better in an undergraduate seeing using rust? Honestly I don't know; I know very little about Rust. I can say that I think C++ is a worse language for this purpose because of the language's complexity and because of features that aren't well suited for the above purposes.
I have heard, for instance, that's it's actually very difficult in rust to write a linked list without dropping to unsafe code. I would consider this a bad thing for the above purposes.
Does anyone know this at this point? With pipelining, out of order execution, vectorisation, register renaming, speculative execution, buffered micro-op fusing and what have you, it's very hard to say general things about how the code executes on the actual hardware.
I'm arguing that it's a matter of degree, not of kind. People make it seem like it's the latter.
Viewing all of code and data living together in a big array is important, I think. You don't understand e.g. dynamically generated thunks and shims without seeing the duality of code and data at the execution level.
Get your cache misses in order(which is easy to understand in the C model) and you're ahead of 95% of the curve(plus you get a 10-50x performance bump as a reward).
It is also hard in C to write a linked list without dropping to unsafe code. In fact, it is hard in C to add frigging signed integers without dropping to unsafe code.