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)

Probing static memory layout

The tools used for inspecting the static memory layout usually work on the object files. To get some initial insight, we'll start with an example, example 4.1, which is a minimal C program that doesn't have any variable or logic as part of it:

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
  return 0;
}

Code Box 4-1 [ExtremeC_examples_chapter4_1.c]: A minimal C program

First, we need to compile the preceding program. We compile it in Linux using gcc:

$ gcc ExtremeC_examples_chapter4_1.c -o ex4_1-linux.out
$

Shell Box 4-1: Compiling example 4.1 using gcc in Linux

After a successful compilation and having the final executable binary linked, we get an executable object file named ex4_1-linux.out. This file contains a predetermined static memory layout that is specific to the Linux operating system, and it will exist in all future processes spawned based on this executable file.

The size command is the first tool that we want to introduce...