Eric Schrock's Blog

Software Abstraction and the Jaws of Life

June 17, 2004

Before I start looking at some of problems we’re addressing in Solaris, I want to step back and examine one of the more fundamental problems I’ve been seeing in the industry. In order to develop more powerful software quickly, we insert layers of abstraction to distance ourselves from the actual implmentation (let someone else worry about it). There is nothing inherently wrong with this; no one is going to argue that you should write your business critical web service in assembly language instead of Java using J2EE. The problem comes from the disturbing trend that programmers are increasingly less knowledgeable about the layers upon which they build.

Most people can sit down and learn how to program Java or C, given enough time. The difference between an average programmer and a gifted programmer is the ability to truly understand the levels above and below where one works. For the majority of us1, this means understanding two things: our development platform and our customers. While understanding customer needs is a difficult task, a more tragic problem is the failure of programmers to understand their immediate development environment.

If you are a C programmer, it is crucial that you understand how virtual memory works, what exactly happens when you write to a file descriptor, and how threads are implemented. You should understand what a compiler does, how the dynamic linker works, and how the assembly code the compiler generates really works. If you are a Java programmer, you need to understand how garbage collection works, how java bytecodes are interpreted, and what JIT compiling really does. Just because you don’t need to know the OS works doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Knowing your environment encourages good software practice, as well as making you more effective at solving problems when they do occur.

Unfortunately, everything in the world is not somebody else’s fault. As these new layers are added, things tend to become less and less observable. Not to mention that poor documentation can ruin an otherwise great tool. You may understand how a large number of cross calls can be the product of a misbehaving application, but if you can’t determine where they’re coming from, what’s the point? We in the Solaris group develop tools to provide useful layers of abstraction, as well as tools that rip the hood off2 so you can see what’s really happening inside.

Before I start examining some of these tools, I just wanted to point out that there is a large human factor involved that is out of our hands. The most powerful tool in the world can be useless in the hands of someone without a basic understanding of their system. Hopefully by providing these tools we can simultaneously expose the inner workings while sparking desire to learn about these inner workings. So take some some time to read a good book once in a while.


1For us kernel developers, the landscape is a little different. We have to work with a multitude of difference hardware (development platforms) in order to provide an effectively limitless number of solutions for our customers. I like to think that kernel engineers are pound-for-pound the best group of programmers around because of this, but maybe that’s just my ego talking.

2Scott is in the habit of talking about how we sell cars, not auto parts. Does that mean we also provide the Jaws of Life to save you after you crash your new Enzo?

2 Responses

  1. Well, as long as you are sufficiently far removed from the lowest layers, you don’t *need* to know the details. But it is definitely *nice* to know. If I’m writing a J2EE app, I probably won’t be able to make any use of the knowledge that the CPU uses a reorder buffer or the memory consistency model of the target architecture is TSO. There are too many layers in between.

  2. Very true. This is more a plea for developers to understand the most immediate layer. It’s astounding how many developers fail to understand this.

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