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)

Multithreading

Multithreading is about employing user threads to perform parallel tasks in a concurrent environment. It's very rare to find a non-trivial program that has only a single thread; almost every program you'll encounter is multithreaded. Threads can only exist inside processes; we cannot have any thread without an owner process. Each process has at least one thread, which is usually called the main thread. A program that is using a single thread to perform all its tasks is called a single-threaded program. All threads within a process have access to the same memory regions, and this means that we won't have to come up with a complex scenario to share a piece of data, like we do in multi-processing.

Since threads are very similar to processes, they can use all the techniques that processes use to share or transfer a state. Therefore, all the techniques explained in the previous section can be employed by threads to access a shared state or transfer...