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 in POSIX

As we explained in the previous sections, concurrency or multitasking is a functionality provided by the kernel of an operating system. Not all kernels have been concurrent since their birth, but most of them support concurrency today. It is nice to know that the first version of Unix was not concurrent, but it gained this feature very soon after its birth.

If you remember Chapter 10, Unix – History and Architecture, we explained how single Unix specification and POSIX tried to standardize the API exposed by the shell ring in a Unix-like operating system. Concurrency has been part of these standards for a long time, and so far, it has allowed many developers to write concurrent programs for POSIX-compliant operating systems. The concurrency support in POSIX has been widely used and implemented in a vast range of operating systems, such as Linux and macOS.

Concurrency in a POSIX-compliant operating system is generally provided in two...