Corso avanzato di programmazione in C, sviluppato con C++ Institute, aiuta ad acquisire conoscenza della sintassi e della semantica del linguaggio C, nonché tipi di dati avanzati come librerie, concetti di programmazione e strumenti di sviluppo, capacità di identificare bug e colli di bottiglia di codice, programmazione di strutture dati avanzate, risoluzione di problemi non banali con l’utilizzo di strutture dati e algoritmi, progettazione e scrittura di programmi mediante infrastrutture linguistiche standard

Il corso prepara alla certificazione CLP 12-01.

Evolution of C – from past to eternity

• milestones: ANSI C, C89, C95, C99, C11
• obsolete (but still valid) language elements
• how function declaration changed over time?
• trigraphs and digraphs
• new C11 keywords:
  • __Noreturn
  • _Alignof and _Alignas
  • _Bool
  • _Exit
  • _Complex
  • _Pragma, _ _func_ _
  • _Generic

Handling variable number of parameters (<stdarg.h>)

• calling conventions, parameters passing, stack usage, stack frame, returning a value, recursion
• va_start()
• va_arg()
• va_end()
• va_copy()
• vsprintf(), vprintf(), vfprintf()
• vscanf(), vsscanf(), vfscanf()
• _ _VA_ARGS_ _

Low level IO (<unistd.h>)

• POSIX, API, ABI, WINAPI, etc.
• access()
• open()
• errno
• close()
• read()
• write()
• lseek()
• dprintf()
• stat()
• symlink(), link()
• readlink()
• unlink()
• fcntl() and ioctl()

Memory and strings (<string.h> et al.)

• manipulating memory blocks
• string manipulation: strchr(), strrchr(), strstr(), strtok()
• qsort(), bsearch()
• aligned_alloc(), calloc(), malloc(), and realloc()
• bcopy()
• memcpy()
• memccpy()
• memmove()
• bzero()
• memset()
• memcmp()
• Internationalization I18N
  • UCS, UTF-8 – how to deal with multilingual environment?
  • universal character names
  • wide characters support in different C dialects (e.g., <wchar.h>, <wctype.h>)
  • strcoll() and wcscoll()

Processes and threads

• definitions, implementations and history
• thread safety
• system(), getenv(), setenv()
• processes in Unix way:
  • fork()
  • exit()
  • execxx()
  • wait() and waitpid()
• processes in MS Windows way:
  • CreateProcess()
  • WaitForSingleObject()
• POSIX threads
• MS Windows threads
• C11 threads (<thread.h>)

Floats and ints once again (<math.h>, <fenv.h>, <inttypes.h> et al.)

• IEEE-754: a different universe
• NaN, infinity, zero
• floats and doubles – should we trust them?
• numerical anomalies vs precision
• ULP
• what is pragma?
• FENV_ACCESS pragma
• floating-point exceptions
• rounding
• multi-precision libraries (GMP, MPFR, MPIR)

Network sockets – absolute basics

• what is a socket? what is a network socket?
• TCP/IP protocol stack, UDP
• connection and connectionless transmissions
• servers and clients
• big and little endians and why you should be aware of them
• socket addressing: IP4, IP6, service numbers
• getaddrinfo()
• socket()
• connect()
• bind()
• listen()
• accept()
• send() and recv()
• simple example of client-server communication
• simple example of peer-to-peer communication

Miscellaneous

• const variables vs. volatile variables
• goto – why and why not, advantages, disadvantages and limitations
• long (non-local) jumps: setjmp() and longjmp()
• static array indices, designated initializers, compound literals, variable-length arrays, flexible array members, restrict keyword
• sequence points: why ++/– may sometimes make you crazy?
• the asm keyword
• portability issues and undefined behaviours