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)

IPC techniques

An IPC technique generally refers to any means that is used by processes to communicate and transmit data. In the previous chapter, we discussed filesystems and shared memory as our beginning approach to share data between two processes. We didn't use the term 'IPC' for these techniques at that point, but this is in fact what they are! In this chapter, we will add a few more IPC techniques to the ones that we have encountered already, but we should remember that they are different in a number of ways. Before jumping to the differences and trying to categorize them, let's list some IPC techniques:

  • Shared memory
  • Filesystem (both on disk and in memory)
  • POSIX signals
  • POSIX pipes
  • POSIX message queues
  • Unix domain sockets
  • Internet (or network) sockets

From the programming point of view, the shared memory and filesystem techniques are similar in certain ways and because of that they can be put into the same group...