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)

Compilation pipeline

Compiling some C files usually takes a few seconds, but during this brief period of time, the source code enters a pipeline that has four distinct components, with each of them doing a certain task. These components are as follows:

  • Preprocessor
  • Compiler
  • Assembler
  • Linker

Each component in this pipeline accepts a certain input from the previous component and produces a certain output for the next component in the pipeline. This process continues through the pipeline until a product is generated by the last component.

Source code can be turned into a product if, and only if, it passes through all the required components with success. This means that even a small failure in one of the components can lead to a compilation or linkage failure, resulting in you receiving relevant error messages.

For certain intermediate products such as relocatable object files, it is enough that a single source file goes through the first three components...