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)

Relocatable object files

In this section, we are going to talk about relocatable object files. As we explained in the previous chapter, these object files are the output of the assembly step in the C compilation pipeline. These files are considered to be temporary products of a C project, and they are the main ingredients to produce further and final products. For this reason, it would be useful to have a deeper look at them and see what we can find in a relocatable object file.

In a relocatable object file, we can find the following items regarding the compiled translation unit:

  • The machine-level instructions produced for the functions found in the translation unit (code).
  • The values of the initialized global variables declared in the translation unit (data).
  • The symbol table containing all the defined and reference symbols found in the translation unit.

These are the key items that can be found in any relocatable object file. Of course, the way that they...