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)

Heap

Almost any code, written in any programming language, uses Heap memory in some way. That's because the Heap has some unique advantages that cannot be achieved by using the Stack.

On the other hand, it also has some disadvantages; for example, it is slower to allocate a region of Heap memory in comparison to a similar region in Stack memory.

In this section, we are going to talk more about the Heap itself and the guidelines we should keep in mind when using Heap memory.

Heap memory is important because of its unique properties. Not all of them are advantageous and, in fact, some of them can be considered as risks that should be mitigated. A great tool always has good points and some bad points, and if you are going to use it properly, you are required to know both sides very well.

Here, we are going to list these features and see which ones are beneficial and which are risky:

  1. The Heap doesn't have any memory blocks that are allocated automatically...