CS 106B: Programming Abstractions
Fall 2025, Stanford University Computer Science Department
Lecturer: Chris Gregg, Head CA: Yasmine Alonso
Announcements
- A7 (Huffman) is due Tomorrow (12/4) at 11:59PM, no late days permitted!
- Final exam is next Monday, 12/8 from 8:30am-11:30am
- Check your seating here! If something looks wrong, email Yasmine ASAP.
- Final exam review session happening on Friday from 4:00-6:00PM in Building 260-113 (Pigott Hall in Main Quad)– see Ed for more details!
Today’s Topics
- NOTE: today’s content will not be tested on the final exam! This is just an attempt to get you interested in what the future of your CS education at Stanford could look like.
- We will be discussing the following:
- Caches + a mini-lesson on computer architecture
- Performance optimization technique your computer employs called “speculative execution”
- Using this knowledge, we’ll discuss a famous vulnerability in the hardware of your computer discovered in 2017 called the Spectre Attack. This is one of Yasmine’s favorite topics that she’s learned at Stanford, so we hope you enjoy getting a little bit of an introduction today :)
- Slides