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)

Process Memory Structure

In this chapter, we are going to talk about memory and its structure within a process. For a C programmer, memory management is always a crucial topic, and applying its best practices requires a basic knowledge about memory structure. In fact, this is not limited to C. In many programming languages such as C++ or Java, you need to have a fundamental understanding of memory and the way it works; otherwise, you face some serious issues that cannot be easily traced and fixed.

You might know that memory management is fully manual in C, and more than that, the programmer is the sole responsible person who allocates memory regions and deallocates them once they're no longer needed.

Memory management is different in high-level programming languages such as Java or C#, and it is done partly by the programmer and partly by the underlying language platform, such as Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in the case of using Java. In these languages, the programmer only...