From the top of my head, these are some areas I often would like other system programmers to know better:
- Understanding how to write purely event-based programs using e.g. epoll since that will avoid lots of complexity and potential problems compared to throwing threads at everything.
- Floating point representation and gotchas ("What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point").
- Unit-testing as part of designing interfaces to get low coupling, sane ergonomics, and forcing some thought to error handling instead of just working in the happy-path case.
- Interrupt- and thread-safety (races, mutexes, deadlocks, orderings etc.)
- Storing state in maintainable ways (i.e. not just dumping C-structs to disk).
- Understanding basic computer architecture concepts like virtual memory, caches, and pipelines.
- Know what can be achieved with OpenMP and GPU programming using OpenCL/CUDA etc.
- Write great commit messages (What is the problem being solved, why this way, etc.)
- Basics of database and distributed systems theory like ACID properties and Lamport timestamps.
- Using regular expressions instead of lots of a complicated set of if-statements.
- Understanding networks regarding error sources and latencies.
- Understanding how to write purely event-based programs using e.g. epoll since that will avoid lots of complexity and potential problems compared to throwing threads at everything.
- Floating point representation and gotchas ("What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point").
- Unit-testing as part of designing interfaces to get low coupling, sane ergonomics, and forcing some thought to error handling instead of just working in the happy-path case.
- Interrupt- and thread-safety (races, mutexes, deadlocks, orderings etc.)
- Storing state in maintainable ways (i.e. not just dumping C-structs to disk).
- Understanding basic computer architecture concepts like virtual memory, caches, and pipelines.
- Know what can be achieved with OpenMP and GPU programming using OpenCL/CUDA etc.
- Write great commit messages (What is the problem being solved, why this way, etc.)
- Basics of database and distributed systems theory like ACID properties and Lamport timestamps.
- Using regular expressions instead of lots of a complicated set of if-statements.
- Understanding networks regarding error sources and latencies.