COMP1521 Notes

Introduction

This document explains some key concepts taught in COMP1521.

It is not a replacement for the lectures, but rather a supplement to them. It is recommended that you attend/watch the lectures first, then read these notes to get a better understanding of the content.

These notes are not comprehensive, and do not cover all the course content. It mostly consists of concepts that I personally found difficult to understand, or believed required further explanation.

If you would like a more complete set of notes, refer to the lecture slides on the course webpage.

If you find any errors in these notes, please let me know by creating an issue on the GitHub repository.

Table of Contents

• COMP1521 Notes
  • Introduction
  • Table of Contents
  • Two's Complement
  • Floating Point
    • Exponential Representation - IEEE 754
    • Exponent Bias
    • Single Precision vs Double Precision
    • Bits in a Float
  • Unicode and UTF-8
    • Definitions
    • UTF-8 Layout
    • Tips for the Exam
  • Processes
    • Process Creation
    • Process Execution State
    • Process ID
    • Process Hierarchy
    • Multi-tasking
    • Process related functions / syscalls
    • Environment Variable Functions
    • Environment Variables and posix_spawn
    • Using exec family functions
    • Pipes
  • Concurrency, Parallelism, Threads
    • Concurrency vs Parallelism
    • Threads
    • Mutual Exclusion
    • Atomics
    • Lifetimes
    • Lifetimes in the context of concurrent programming
    • Barriers
  • Virtual Memory
    • Loading Pages from Memory
    • Caching