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)

Memory management in constrained environments

There are environments in which memory is a precious resource, and it is often limited. There are also other environments in which performance is a key factor and programs should be fast, no matter how much memory we have. Regarding memory management, each of these environments requires a specific technique to overcome the memory shortage and performance degradation. First, we need to know what a constrained environment is.

A constrained environment does not necessarily have a low memory capacity. There are usually some constraints that limit the memory usage for a program. These constraints can be your customer's hard limits regarding memory usage, or it could be because of a hardware that provides the low memory capacity, or it can be because of an operating system that does not support a bigger memory (for example, MS-DOS).

Even if there are no constraints or hardware limitations, we as programmers try our best to use the...