Part II. The Language

This is the part where we reconsider everything about the C language.

There are two parts to the process: working out what bits of the language not to use, and then finding out about the new things. Some of the new things are syntactic features, such as being able to initialize a list of struct elements by name; some of the new things are functions that have been written for us and are now common, such as the functions that will allow us to write to strings without quite as much pain.

I assume basic knowledge of C. Readers new to the language may want to read Appendix A first.

The chapters cover the material as follows:

Chapter 6 provides a guide for those perplexed (or perhaps made a bit uneasy) by pointers.

Chapter 7 is where we start building by tearing down. We’ll go over a survey of concepts covered by the typical textbooks that I believe should be downplayed or considered deprecated.

Chapter 8 goes in the other direction, offering more in-depth discussion of concepts I found were mentioned only in passing or were missing entirely from typical textbooks.

In Chapter 9, we pay special attention to strings and work out how to handle them without memory allocation or character-counting madness. malloc will be lonely, because you’ll never call it.

Chapter 10 presents newer syntax, which will let us write function calls in ISO-standard C with inputs such as lists of arbitrary length; e.g., sum(1, 2.2, [...] 39, 40) or named, optional elements like new_person (.name="Joe", .age=32, .sex='M'). Like rock and roll, these syntactic features saved my life. If I hadn’t known about them, I would have abandoned C a long time ago.

Chapter 11 is a deconstruction of the concept of object-oriented programming. It is a many-headed hydra, and translating all of it to C would be a Herculean task of limited benefit, but there are some aspects of the paradigm that are easily implemented when needed.

It may sound too good to be true, but with one line of code, you can double or quadruple the speed of your program (or even better). The secret is in parallel threads, and Chapter 12 covers covers three systems for turning your single-threaded program into a multithreaded program.

Having covered the idea of how one would structure a library, let’s use a few in Chapter 13 to do advanced math, talk to an Internet server via whatever protocol it speaks, run a database, and otherwise kick some ass.