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The C++ Programmer's Mindset
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The operating system is a piece of software that controls the operation of the whole computer (hence the name). It runs in a special privileged state, commonly called kernel mode, that can execute instructions on the CPU that cannot usually be accessed by user-level (unprivileged) applications. The operating system has many roles, such as managing the hardware, scheduling processes on the CPU cores, and managing the mapping between process memory addresses and the physical RAM.
Common operating systems such as Windows and Linux do not let user code access memory directly. Instead, the addresses that are provided by the operating system and that are used for instructions are addresses in virtual memory, which is unique to each process. This is done for a number of reasons, with one being security. Another reason for using virtual memory is that each process can operate as if it had more memory than is physically available. Of course...