In this chapter, you progressed from Hello, World in the introductory chapter to slightly more complex programs. You saw how Scala Native’s bare-metal techniques for low-level I/O and memory management allow us to substantially outperform equivalent programs on the JVM. In the process, you gained familiarity with strings and pointers, two of the low-level data structures that distinguish systems programming from typical high-level programs. Next, we’ll continue our deep dive into the fundamentals of systems programming, learning about arrays and structs as we continue to work through some basic algorithms on our Google NGrams dataset.