Book Image

Extreme C

By : Kamran Amini
5 (2)
Book Image

Extreme C

5 (2)
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)

Summary

In this chapter, we explored multi-processing systems and the various techniques that can be used to share a state among a number of processes. The following topics were covered in this chapter:

  • We introduced the POSIX APIs used for process execution. We explained how the fork API and exec* functions work.
  • We explained the steps that a kernel takes to execute a process.
  • We discussed the ways that a state can be shared among a number of processes.
  • We introduced the pull-based and push-based techniques as the two top-level categories for all other available techniques.
  • Shared memory and shared files on a filesystem are among common techniques to share a state in a pull-based manner.
  • We explained the differences and similarities of multithreading and multi-processing deployments and the concepts of vertical and horizontal scaling in a distributed software system.

In the next chapter, we are going to talk about concurrency in single-host multi...