IAP 2013

David Greenberg (Two Sigma), Trammell Hudson (Two Sigma)

	Jan/15	Tue	05:00PM-07:00PM	4-231
	Jan/16	Wed	05:00PM-07:00PM	4-231

Enrollment: Unlimited: No advance sign-up
Attendance: Participants requested to attend all sessions
Prereq: basic familiarity with C and comfort with pointers

C, love it or hate it, is somewhere at the foundation of most software today. While some may call it a glorified assembler, C does provide many useful features while giving you the option to get close to the hardware and have precise control over everything your machine does. We'll learn how to make your C a lot less painful to write with features you thought were only in higher-level languages, we'll also go over when you might want to get closer to the hardware, and how to go about using those gcc-specific features.

Topics covered in the first session will include:

• function pointers
• structs, unions, bitfields
• using gotos safely and correctly
• dispatch tables
• volatile, register, restrict keywords
• gcc specific extensions
•      attributes for alignment, packing, functions
•      addresses of labels
•      nested functions
•      variadic macros
• preprocessor magic
•      macro notation (pasting, evaluation, sub-blocks)
•      useful predefined macros
•      x-macros

 

Topics covered in the second session will include:

• inline asm
•      constraints on arguments
•      clobbers
•      clones
• gcc optimization
•      how to write code that optimizes well
•      how to identify patterns that the optimizer is effective at taking advantage of

Sponsor(s): Student Information Processing Board, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Contact: David Greenberg, sipb-iap-advc@mit.edu