Chapter 5: Hardware-Software Interface
The vast majority of computer software is not written at the processor instruction level in assembly language. Most of the applications we work with on a daily basis are written in one high-level programming language or another, using a pre-built library of capabilities that the application programmers extended during the software development process. Practical programming environments, consisting of high-level languages and their associated libraries, offer many services, including disk input/output (I/O), network communication, and interactions with users, all easily accessible from program code.
This chapter describes the software layers that implement these features, beginning at the level of processor ...
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