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)

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the fundamental steps and components required to build a C project. Without knowing how to build a project, it is pointless to just write code. In this chapter:

  • We went through the C compilation pipeline and its various steps. We discussed each step and described the inputs and the outputs.
  • We defined the term platform and how different assemblers can lead to different machine-level instructions for the same C program.
  • We continued to discuss each step and the component driving that step in a greater detail.
  • As part of the compiler component, we explained what the compiler frontends and backends are, and how GCC and LLVM use this separation to support many languages.
  • As part of our discussion regarding the assembler component, we saw that object files are platform-dependent, and they should have an exact file format.
  • As part of the linker component, we discussed what a linker does and how it uses symbols to find the missing...