Some of the practices of system programming—such as having an application that is tied to the hardware, performance oriented, and working on an environment that is resource constrained—are an approach that can also be valid when building distributed systems, where constraining resource usage allows the reduction of the number of instances needed. It looks like system programming is a good way of addressing generic software engineering problems.

This means that learning the concept of system programming with regards to using the resource of the machine efficiently—from memory usage to filesystem access—will be useful when building any type of application.