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)

Application binary interface (ABI)

As you may already know, every library or framework, regardless of the technologies or the programming language used, exposes a set of certain functionalities, which is known as its Application Programming Interface (API). If a library is supposed to be used by another code, then the consumer code should use the provided API. To be clear, nothing other than the API should be used in order to use a library because it is the public interface of the library and everything else is seen as a black box, hence cannot be used.

Now suppose after some time, the library's API undergoes some modifications. In order for the consumer code to continue using the newer versions of the library, the code must adapt itself to the new API; otherwise, it won't be able to use it anymore. The consumer code could stick to a certain version of the library (maybe an old one) and ignore the newer versions, but let's assume that there is a desire to upgrade...