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)

Process execution APIs

Every program is executed as a process. Before we have a process, we just have an executable binary file that contains some memory segments and probably lots of machine-level instructions. Conversely, every process is an individual instance of a program being executed. Therefore, a single compiled program (or an executable binary file) can be executed multiple times through different processes. In fact, that's why our focus is on the processes in this chapter, rather than upon the programs themselves.

In two previous chapters, we talked about threads in single-process software, but to follow our objective in this chapter, we are going to be talking about software with multiple processes. But first, we need to know how, and by using which API, a new process can be spawned.

Note that our main focus is on executing processes in Unix-like operating systems since all of them follow the Unix onion architecture and expose very well-known and similar...