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)

Intrinsic concurrency issues

Every concurrent system with more than one task can have a number of possible interleavings, which can be thought of as an intrinsic property of the system. From what we've learned so far, we know that this property has a non-deterministic nature, which causes the instructions of different tasks to be executed in a chaotic order in each run, while still following the happens-before constraints. Note that this is something that has already been explained in the previous chapter.

Interleavings are not problematic by themselves and, as we've explained before, they're an intrinsic property of a concurrent system. But in some cases, this property dissatisfies some constraints that are meant to be conserved. This is exactly when interleavings yield issues.

We know that it's possible to have many interleavings while a number of tasks are being executed concurrently. Yet issues only arise when a constraint of the system, which should have...