21st Century C by Klemens, Ben -- Read -- Imperial Library of Trantor

Index

21st Century C 1. Preface: C is punk rock

Q & A [Or, the parameters of the book] Standards: so many to choose from

The POSIX standard

Some logistics

Conventions Used in This Book Using Code Examples Safari® Books Online How to Contact Us Credits

I. The environment

2. Set yourself up for easy compilation

Use a package manager Compiling C for Windows

POSIX for Windows Compiling C with POSIX Compiling C without POSIX

Which way to the library?

A few of my favorite flags Paths Run-time linking

Using makefiles

Setting variables The rules

Using libraries from source Using libraries from source (even if your sysadmin doesn’t want you to) Compiling C programs via here document

Include header files from the command line The unified header Here documents Compiling from stdin

3. Debug, test, document

Using a debugger

GDB variables Print your structures

Use Valgrind to check for errors Unit testing

Using a program as a library Coverage

Interweaving documentation

Doxygen

The narrative

Literate code with CWEB

Error checking

What is the user’s involvement in the error? The context in which the user is working How should the error indication be returned?

4. Packaging your project

The shell

Replacing shell commands with their outputs Use the shell’s for loops to operate on a set of files Test for files fc

Makefiles versus shell scripts Packaging your code with Autotools

An Autotools demo Describing the makefile in makefile.am

Form variables Content variables Adding testing Adding Makefile bits

The configure script More bits of shell

5. Version control

Changes via diff Git’s objects

The stash

Trees and their branches

Merging The rebase

Remote repositories

6. Playing nice with others

The process

Writing to be read by non-natives The wrapper function Smuggling data structures across the border Linking

Python host

Compiling and linking The conditional subdirectory for Automake Distutils b/w Autotools

II. The language

7. Your pal the pointer

Static, automatic, manual memory Persistent state variables Pointers without malloc

Structures get copied, arrays get aliased malloc and memory-twiddling The fault is in our stars All the pointer arithmetic you need to know

typedef as a teaching tool

8. C syntax you can ignore

Don’t bother explicitly returning from main() Let declarations flow

Set array size at runtime

Cast less Enums and strings Labels, gotos, switches, and breaks

goto considered Switch

Deprecate float

9. Obstacles and opportunity

Cultivate robust and flourishing macros

Preprocessor tricks

Linkage with static and extern

Declare externally linked elements only in header files

The const keyword

Noun-adjective form Tension Depth The char const ** issue

10. Text

Making string handling less painful with asprintf

Security Constant strings Extending strings with asprintf

A pæan to strtok Unicode

The encoding for C code Unicode libraries The sample code

11. Better structures

Compound literals

Initialization via compound literals

Variadic macros Safely terminated lists Foreach Vectorize a function Designated initializers Initialize arrays and structs with zeros Typedefs save the day

A style note

Return multiple items from a function

Reporting errors

Flexible function inputs

Declare your function as printf-style Optional and named arguments Polishing a dull function

The void pointer and the structures it points to

Functions with generic inputs Generic structures

12. Object-oriented programming in C

What you don’t get (and why you won’t miss it)

Scope

Private struct elements

Overloaded with operator overloading

_Generic

Extending structures and dictionaries

Extending a structure

C, with fewer seams

Implementing a dictionary Base your code on pointers to objects

Functions in your structs Count references

Example: a substring object An agent-based model of group formation

13. Libraries

Glib POSIX

Using mmap for gigantic data sets Easy threading with Pthreads

The pthreads checklist Protect threaded resources with mutexes The example __Thread_local and static variables

The GNU Scientific Library SQLite

The queries

libXML & cURL

14. Epilogue

Glossary Bibliography About the Author Copyright

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