Technical requirements

This chapter doesn’t require you to set up anything new, but since we’re writing some low-level code for three different platforms, you need access to these platforms if you want to run all the examples.

The best way to follow along is to open the accompanying repository on your computer and navigate to the ch03 folder.

This chapter is a little special since we build some basic understanding from the ground up, which means some of it is quite low-level and requires a specific operating system and CPU family to run. Don’t worry; I’ve chosen the most used and popular CPU, so this shouldn’t be a problem, but it is something you need to be aware of.

The machine must use a CPU using the x86-64 instruction set on Windows and Linux. Intel and AMD desktop CPUs use this architecture, but if you run Linux (or WSL) on a machine using an ARM processor you might encounter issues with some of the examples using inline assembly. On...