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)

POSIX threads

This section is dedicated to the POSIX threading API, better known as the pthread library. This API is very important because it's the main API used for creating and managing the threads in a POSIX-compliant operating system.

In non-POSIX-compliant operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, there should be another API designed for this purpose and it can be found in the documentation of that operating system. For example, in the case of Microsoft Windows, the threading API is provided as part of the Windows API, known as the Win32 API. This is the link to Microsoft's documentation regarding Windows' threading API: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/procthread/process-and-thread-functions.

However, as part of C11, we expect to have a unified API to work with threads. In other words, regardless of whether you're writing a program for a POSIX system or a non-POSIX system, you should be able to use the same API provided by C11. While...