C / Advanced: Language Boundaries and Systems

C β€” Advanced: Language Boundaries and Systems

Reason about undefined behavior, generic interfaces, data structures, concurrency, portability, and measured performance.

6 lessons Β· No account required

What you will learn

  • Review code against alignment, lifetime, and sequencing rules.
  • Design callbacks and containers with explicit invariants.
  • Separate ISO C guarantees from operating-system contracts.

  1. Undefined Behavior, Alignment, and Access Rules

    Classify language guarantees precisely and replace representation tricks with operations whose contracts can be justified.

    Start learning

  2. Callbacks and Generic Interfaces

    Pass behavior through correctly typed function pointers, and keep generic data access tied to explicit size and context contracts.

    Start learning

  3. Data Structures and Invariants

    Derive operations from representation invariants and keep topology, ownership, and complexity visible in the design.

    Start learning

  4. C11 Concurrency and Atomics

    Reason about shared objects through synchronization and happens-before relationships rather than timing, volatile, or observed machine behavior.

    Start learning

  5. Portability and System Interfaces

    Define a portable core and isolate operating-system contracts, external encodings, and ABI assumptions at explicit boundaries.

    Start learning

  6. Performance, Measurement, and Correctness

    Optimize a defined program against a representative workload, and separate algorithmic improvement from unsupported timing claims.

    Start learning
Back to course