These sound like dismissals or absurdities from the outside, but once you learn what they really mean, they take on a new light. In this article, I want to explain the third. (See the appendix if you are curious about the first two.)

In this tutorial, I will teach you how to write your own virtual machine (VM) that can run assembly language programs, such as my friend’s 2048 or my Roguelike. If you know how to program, but would like to gain a deeper understanding of what is going on inside a computer and better understand how programming languages work, then this project is for you. Writing your own VM may sound a little scary, but I promise that you will find it to be surprisingly simple and enlightening.

Coccinelle is a tool for pattern matching and text transformation that has many uses in kernel development, including the application of complex, tree-wide patches and detection of problematic programming patterns.