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)

Summary

In this chapter, we went through the basics of concurrency, and the essential concepts and terminology that you need to know in order to understand the upcoming topics of multithreading and multi-processing.

Specifically, we discussed the following:

  • The definitions of concurrency and parallelism – the fact that each parallel task needs to have its own processor unit, while concurrent tasks can share a single processor.
  • Concurrent tasks use a single processor unit while a task scheduler manages the processor time and shares it between different tasks. This will lead to a number context switches and different interleavings for each task.
  • An introduction to blocking instructions. We also explained the patterns that suggest when we require concurrency, and the way we could break a single task into two or three concurrent tasks.
  • We described what a shared state is. We also showed how a shared state could lead to serious concurrency issues like...