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)

Spawning POSIX threads

Having gone through all the fundamental concepts like interleaving, locks, mutexes, and condition variables, in the previous chapters, and introducing the concept of POSIX threads in this chapter, it is the time to write some code.

The first step is to create a POSIX thread. In this section, we are going to demonstrate how we can use the POSIX threading API to create new threads within a process. Following example 15.1 describes how to create a thread that performs a simple task like printing a string to the output:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
// The POSIX standard header for using pthread library
#include <pthread.h>
// This function contains the logic which should be run
// as the body of a separate thread
void* thread_body(void* arg) {
  printf("Hello from first thread!\n");
  return NULL;
}
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
  // The thread handler
  pthread_t thread;
  // Create a new thread
  int result...