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)

Multi-processing

Multi-processing simply means using processes to do concurrent tasks. A very good example is the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) standard in web servers. The web servers employing this technique launch a new interpreter process for each HTTP request. This way, they can serve multiple requests simultaneously.

On such web servers, for a high throughput of requests, you might see that many interpreter processes are spawned and running at the same time, each of which is handling a different HTTP request. Since they are different processes, they are isolated and cannot see the memory regions of each other. Fortunately, in the CGI use case, the interpreter processes don't need to communicate with each other or share data. But this is not always the case.

There are many examples in which a number of processes are doing some concurrent tasks, and they need to share crucial pieces of information in order to let the software continue functioning. As an example, we...