Book Image

Extreme C

By : Kamran Amini
5 (1)
Book Image

Extreme C

5 (1)
By: Kamran Amini

Overview of this book

There’s a lot more to C than knowing the language syntax. The industry looks for developers with a rigorous, scientific understanding of the principles and practices. Extreme C will teach you to use C’s advanced low-level power to write effective, efficient systems. This intensive, practical guide will help you become an expert C programmer. Building on your existing C knowledge, you will master preprocessor directives, macros, conditional compilation, pointers, and much more. You will gain new insight into algorithm design, functions, and structures. You will discover how C helps you squeeze maximum performance out of critical, resource-constrained applications. C still plays a critical role in 21st-century programming, remaining the core language for precision engineering, aviations, space research, and more. This book shows how C works with Unix, how to implement OO principles in C, and fully covers multi-processing. In Extreme C, Amini encourages you to think, question, apply, and experiment for yourself. The book is essential for anybody who wants to take their C to the next level.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)

Unix architecture

In this section, we are going to explore the philosophy that the Unix creators had in mind and what they were expecting it to be when they created the architecture.

As we've explained in the previous section, the people involved in Unix from Bell Labs were working for the Multics project. Multics was a big project, the proposed architecture was complex, and it was tuned to be used on expensive hardware. But we should remember that despite all the difficulties, Multics had big goals. The ideas behind the Multics project revolutionized the way we were thinking about the operating systems.

Despite the challenges and difficulties discussed previously the ideas presented in the project were successful because Multics managed to live for around 40 years, until the year 2000. Not only that, but the project created a huge revenue stream for its owner company.

People such as Ken Thompson and his colleagues brought ideas into Unix even though Unix was, initially...