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)

Stack

A process can continue working without the Heap segment but not without the Stack segment. This says a lot. The Stack is the main part of the process metabolism, and it cannot continue execution without it. The reason is hiding behind the mechanism driving the function calls. As briefly explained in the previous chapter, calling a function can only be done by using the Stack segment. Without a Stack segment, no function call can be made, and this means no execution at all.

With that said, the Stack segment and its contents are engineered carefully to result in the healthy execution of the process. Therefore, messing with the Stack content can disrupt the execution and halt the process. Allocation from the Stack segment is fast, and it doesn't need any special function call. More than that, the deallocation and all memory management tasks happen automatically. All these facts are all very tempting and encourage you to overuse the Stack.

You should be careful about...