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Concur. 15 years ago, as sophomores we built a functional virtual cpu from the transistor level up. As I recall that was about 4 weeks, for the rest of the course, we extended the CPU with cache, extended opcode support, bus expansion, implemented a lexer/parser and ended writing our own assembly subset implementation and using that to write programs.

As for the OP's contention that computer science doesn't teach you to look for higher level things like cache thrashing, I wholeheartedly dissent with that supposition.

I recall at least 3 courses where substantial coursework was devoted to hacking, stack smashing, reverse compiling, profiling/introspection, kernel modification, so much beyond 'dynamic typing is an OO antipattern' stuff that gets IMO erroneously conflated with CS degrees.

Maybe these shit schools exist, but in a top 20 program you will definitely learn cache pitfalls.






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