Even if you're working in a high-level language like a C extension to Ruby?

They had to patch the C extension to make their Ruby code go faster. They weren't hacking the C extension to begin with.

It certainly looks like a C++ module is part of their project: http://github.com/eventmachine/eventmachine/tree/master

As a representative of kids and kid-ettes, that stuff is actually still taught. In addition to writing malloc and a proxy, we (I'm a TA) have labs that are designed to force students to disassemble and reverse engineer compiled code. Further, this is actually a required course for Computer Science majors and Electrical and Computer Engineers at my school.

We're keepin' it real

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~213/assignments.html

timetobleed guy here - I'm a CMU CS alumn (class of '07). I miss the good old days of 213 and 410 =]

Those of us who work with Joe can vouch for that :)

I think in this case, knowing how a GC works was more important than knowing your way around the tools they used. Don't get me wrong, knowing what a compiler does, how to use gdb well, and the semantics of the stack well is important, but I think, in this scenario, understanding the garbage collection algorithm was more important than the tools they used.