Part 3. Experience

The alpine chough lives and breeds in the thin air of high altitudes and has been seen above 8000 m in the Himalayas.

In this level, we go more deeply into details about specific topics. The first, performance, is one of the primary reasons C is chosen over other programming languages. Therefore, chapter 15 is a mandatory read for all C software designers.

The second topic is a feature that is quite specific to C: function-like macros. Because of their complexity and obvious ugliness, they are much frowned upon by other programming communities. Nevertheless, it is important to master them to a certain extent, because they allow us to provide easy-to-use interfaces: for example, for type-generic programming and more sophisticated parameter checking.

Chapters 17 and 18 then show how the usual assumption of sequential program execution can be weakened to allow for asynchronous problem handling (with long jumps or signal handlers) or the parallel execution of threads. These come with specific problems related to guaranteeing data consistency, so we conclude with chapter 19, which dives more deeply into the handling of atomic data and synchronization in general.