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)

Summary

As part of this chapter, we mainly covered the Stack and Heap segments and the way they should be used. After that, we briefly discussed memory-constrained environments and we saw how techniques like caching and memory pools can increase the performance.

In this chapter:

  • We discussed the tools and techniques used for probing both Stack and Heap segments.
  • We introduced debuggers and we used gdb as our main debugger to troubleshoot memory-related issues.
  • We discussed memory profilers and we used valgrind to find memory issues such as leakages or dangling pointers happening at runtime.
  • We compared the lifetime of a Stack variable and a Heap block and we explained how we should judge the lifetime of such memory blocks.
  • We saw that memory management is automatic regarding Stack variables, but it is fully manual with Heap blocks.
  • We went through the common mistakes that happen when dealing with Stack variables.
  • We discussed the constrained environments...