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)

Concurrency

You may have heard about multitasking – well, concurrency has the same idea. If your system is managing multiple tasks at the same time, you need to understand that it does not necessarily mean that the tasks are being run in parallel. Instead, there can be a task scheduler in the middle; this simply switches very quickly between the different tasks and performs a tiny bit of each of them in a fairly small amount of time.

This certainly happens when you have just one processor unit. For the rest of our discussion in this section, we assume that we are operating on just one processor unit.

If a task scheduler is sufficiently fast and fair, you won't notice the switching between the tasks, and they'll appear to be running in parallel from your perspective. That's the magic of concurrency, and the very reason why it is being used in most of the widely known operating systems, including Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.

Concurrency could...