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 Synchronization

This chapter continues our discussion in the previous chapter, Process Execution, and our main focus will be on process synchronization. Control mechanisms in multi-process programs are different from the control techniques we met in multi-threaded programs. It is not just the memory which differs; there are other factors that you cannot find in a multi-threaded program, and they exist in a multi-process environment.

Despite threads that are bound to a process, processes can live freely on any machine, with any operating system, located anywhere within a network as big as the internet. As you might imagine, things become complicated. It will not be easy to synchronize a number of processes in such a distributed system.

This chapter is dedicated to process synchronization happening in just one machine. In other words, it mainly talks about single-host synchronization and the techniques around it. We discuss briefly the process synchronization in...