Is there any reliable and simple priority queue (linked list preferred, not necessary) implementation for C?
More generally, what C standard libraries do you use?
PQLib (the current accepted answer) is incomplete and the functionality doesn't match the documentation as of this posting. E.g., the pq_dequeue documentation says it returns an entry. The implementation returns NULL. There are many "TO DO" comments in the code, such as, "remove node containing highest priority entry from its heap." Essential logic is missing.
To anyone looking for a priority queue: I recommend finding some code that has good, passing unit tests. I don't recommend PQLib unless it's updated and includes tests.
To the owner of PQLib or anyone recommending it: I assumed this code was complete and spent a fair bit of time debugging until I realized it wasn't, which was frustrating. Please don't recommend code you haven't tried or know to be a work in progress.
The source code accompanying Robert Sedgewick's Algorithms in C, Parts 1-4 (Fundamental Algorithms, Data Structures, Sorting, Searching) contains both a heap-based and a list-based implementation. See Chapter 9 - Priority Queues and Heapsort.
I have a priority queue written in C, hosted on google code. MIT license
https://code.google.com/p/pqueue-heap-c/source/browse/trunk/pqueue.cpp
The code has been used in a few projects so it's solid, but I wrote it in '98 so I don't remember how to use it. Don't be misled by the cpp extension. It's straight C.
Check out PQLib.
I use the standard C standard libraries. ;)
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Closed 10 years ago.
Member functions can be emulated in C by passing the this pointer explicitly. Virtual functions can be emulated by explicitly storing in every object a pointer to a global array of function pointers. Fine.
Now my question is, do people actually do this? I am wondering if it's worth teaching this technique, because I do not want to teach something to C freshmen that is practically never used in the real world.
(I need to fill the last day of a two-week introductory C course for people already familiar with OOP.)
Are there any relevant projects, libraries or frameworks that emulate OO in C in the manner described?
I've about twenty years experience in C. It was the first compiled language I learned and I've never needed to move on, so it's been C and only C, all the way. I write code constantly at work and at home. I have published a library of lock-free data structures. I think I'm a competent C programmer.
With regard to your question, OO consists of a number of concepts. One, for example, is instantiation, e.g a library with a new() and delete() and instances of a given entity (stack, list, etc). C supports this and it is, of course, a very functional and useful approach. I've used this approach for about fifteen years.
Many years ago I began experimenting with another OO concept, well supported in C++, inheritance. I wanted an entity which contained other entities. The problem then is exposing the API of the contained entites. You can do it, but the fact is, the C language does not naturally express such an concept and approach. It is not something I now use.
My advice is; a knife is a knife, a fork is a fork. You can use either as the other, but it doesn't work well. C does not naturally support some (important) OO concepts, such as inheritance. Don't try to make C do these things. If you want to do this, use C++.
Yes, they do.
Are there any relevant projects, libraries or frameworks that emulate OO in C in the manner described?
I wouldn't call it "emulating" just because there's no first-class language support. See GObject.
A lot of project uses the Object oriented paradigms in C codebase. For various reasons they don't use CPP directly. For system level or performance intensive projects, Other languages don't cut the deal. So its a battle between cpp and c.
Why people emulate OO in C instead of full blown CPP is topic of heated arguments. Linus torvalds once famously stated, CPP compilers are not trustworthy. He has little faith on CPP generated code.
Linux kernel is a good example of implementing OO design patterns in C. You can read about how Linux kernel did it in this lwn.net article series :
part1
part2
There is a extensive free document lying around in internet which covers a full range implementation OO design patterns in C.
ooc.pdf
You can find many other projects along the same road.
Examples:
pjsip
sofia
It may not be used in practice, but it is incredibly valuable to learn the concept of the equivalence between member functions and functions that take the object as the first parameter. Having this concept in the back of their head will help them in many problems they will encounter down the road.
Day in and day out I see people asking questions on Stack Overflow about why it doesn't work to point to pass a member function to something requiring function pointer, and things like that. They think that member functions are just some magical functions that are part of an object, and over-complicate the whole situation. If they had realized that member functions were equivalent to functions that took the object as the first parameter, then the problem they're having (that to call the method they would somehow need both the member function pointer as well as the object), as well as possible solutions (somehow pass the object in separately, or make some kind of closure that captures the object) becomes apparent. Apparently, too many people just pretend that OO is "magic" and don't understand this.
In functional programming, we often teach people how data structures and local variables and all that stuff could be written purely in terms of manipulation of functions. Not that this is practical -- it would probably be inefficient -- but this impresses upon them something about the power of functions. And it helps them to understand things in a different way. And maybe down the road if they write a compiler or something, these equivalences will come in handy.
Computer science is all about equivalences and reductions, and how to think about one problem in terms of another. We reduce SAT-3 to subset sum, not because that's actually how we would actually solve the SAT-3 problem, but because this teaches us that subset sum is NP-complete.
Every once in a while, I come across a piece of code written by someone else, where non-instance methods take a pointer to a structure as an argument, and I see a pattern and a light bulb goes off in my head, and I say, ah-ha, this can be re-factored into an instance method, because I know about this equivalence. So you see, knowing these equivalences also helps us to write better, simpler code.
Check out TI's "DSP Algorithm Standard" / xDAIS framework.
There's a generic C API that every conforming DSP algorithm implementation implements (sorry for the tautology). The need for all this "art" stems from several issues common in the DSP world:
relatively small RAMs
multiple data channels (often parallel/concurrent)
complex algorithm usage patterns
something else I forget
The standard and framework aim at making it easier for DSP engineers to use 3rd party DSP algorithms.
There's an interface to configure an algorithm instance and query its memory requirements (based on the configuration) and there are support functions that actually manage the memory.
Some memory areas, scratchpads, can be allocated temporarily and given to an algorithm instance when it's active and taken away from it when it's inactive and given to another instance, effectively shared.
There's also functionality (and APIs) to move instance memory buffers to defragment memory.
There's more, but I'd need to reread the docs to recall the details.
See IALG_*() and ALG_*() interface methods for example.
Also, there are tools to validate implementations of the generic APIs. 3rd parties can request official validation of them from TI.
Some relevant links: spru352g.pdf, spru360e.pdf.
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Closed 11 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
C Analog To STL
Oftentimes, when programming in C, I find myself wishing that I had access to something like the vector or list classes from C++, and I end up implementing a sort of stripped-down version of some high-level data structure, but it takes a fair amount of time. I am wondering if anyone knows of a good library of high quality simple data structures in C?
Well, there's the GLib library, library, which is what is used to implement the GTK+ widget set. GLib uses GObject as a way to do OOP in C. But GObjectified C is famous for being very verbose.
Other than GLib as others have suggested, you could create your own generic types without any type safety, such as a linked list that uses void * as the generic pointer to the next stack object. Some have even used macros to create template-like behaviour in ANSI C with some reasonable success. Search around cplusplus.com's forums for an example or two (there aren't many more than that if I recall correctly).
Alternatively you could implement your own OOP scheme as described in the paper Object-Oriented Programming With ANSI C, though it's something I wouldn't recommend. You might as well take the time you'd spend creating that beast (and possibly not understanding how it works in the end) and learn some of GLib to get familiar with it.
Personally I prefer the first approach. You lose type safety and gain a bunch of casts, but it's the fastest to implement. The real problem with that method is the data that is stored. std::stack<int> converted to C is simply a struct stack that has a data field of type int. What about std::vector<std::stack<int> >, an addressable list of stacks of integers? The C standard cannot guarantee that casting from a pointer type to an integral type will work without some loss of information. In other words, while you can necessarily use pointers, you can't use plain integers to store information. Perhaps a few unrolled template specializations would work -- one for int, (one for long long?), one for double, and one for pointer types.
In the end, the best solution is to use a library like GLib, but if you prefer to roll your own, take care when creating it. You never know when you'll need a combination of types of items in a container.
I like GLib for this kind of thing; the code you end up writing is clean, the libraries are easy to use, stable, mature and cross-platform, and the documentation is excellent.
You may also want to take a look at Rusty Russell's CCAN project. I haven't used any code from it but I will definitely go dip my toe in the next time I have similar needs:
http://ccan.ozlabs.org/
The Idea
That nice snippets of C code should be moved out of junkcode directories and exposed to a wider world, where they can become something useful.
CCAN is loosely modelled after the successful CPAN project for Perl code development and
sharing.
Is there a library that implements lock-free algorithms(queue, linked list and others) written in C (not in C++)? I've taken a look at some libraries like Intel's, but I would like to use generic libraries, at least more generic than Intel's one.
See Practical lock-free data structures from the University of Cambridge
I've written my own, Rig, currently queue, stack and list are there, hash-table will soon follow. While I'm still working on it, it is intended for public consumption, and the API is mostly stable, just use the SVN trunk. :)
The only other such library in C that I know of is liblfds, though I've never used it.
liblfds
http://www.liblfds.org
Wiki with full API documentation, forum for questions, blog for reading the author rattle on :-)
Platform independent. Out of the box for Windows, Linux, Intel and ARM.
Release 7 should be out in a month or two. Will add run-time cache line alignment, backoff and SMR. (SMR also gives a ton of the other CPU types - basically, anything GCC compiles on which supports atomic ops, e.g. SPARC, MIPS, IA64, etc).
Also, there's no license - you can use the code however you want. Make money! It's not GPL.
I'm currently writing a lock-free lib but it's C++. Here's an STL-like Lock-Free Doubly-Linked List.
The memory manager it uses is quite powerful (32-bit CAS without ABA issues) so I'm using it to create a complete set of containers: a lock-free map/set (using skip lists), a lock-free bag (instead of queue/stack), and a lock-free unordered map (hash table using split-ordered lists).
For more info about the doubly-linked list check out my answer to a related question.
My task is to write an app(unfortunatly on C) which reads expression in infix notation(with variables, unary and binary operators) and store it in memory, then evaluate it. Also, checks for correctness should be performed.
for example:
3*(A+B)-(-2-78)*2+(0*A)
After I got all values, program should calculate it.
The question is:
What is the best way to do this?(with optimization and validation)
What notation to choice as the base of tree?
Should I represent expression as tree? If so I can easily optimize it(just drop nodes which returns 0 or smth else).
Cheers,
The link suggested in the comment by Greg Hewgill above contains all the info you'll need:
If you insist on writing your own,
a recursive descent parser is probably the simplest way to do it by hand.
Otherwise you could use a tool like Bison (since you're working in C). This tutorial is the best I've seen for working with Flex and Bison (or Lex/Yacc)
You can also search for "expression evaluator" on Codeproject - they have a lot of articles on the topic.
I came across the M4 program's expression evaluator some time ago. You can study its code to see how it works. I think this link on Google Codesearch is the version I saw.
Your question hints at requirements being put on your solution:
unfortunatly on C
so some suggestions here might not be permissible. Nevertheless, I would suggest that this is quite a complicated problem to solve, and that you would be much better off trying to find a suitable existing library which you could link into your C code to do this for you. This would likely reduce the time and effort required to get the code working, and reduce the ongoing maintenance effort. Of course, you'd have to think about licensing, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't a good parsing/evaluation library "out there" which could do a good job of this.
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Closed 9 years ago.
What is the best place or a link to learn algorithms in C? How do you know when and where to use the implementation of algorithms by just looking into the problems?
Algorithms aren't necessarily tied to a specific language, just to clarify, so any algorithms book will work great as long as you can understand the concept being the data structure/algorithm.
That said, this seems like a good choice: Algorithms in C. I have the C++ equivalent on my shelf.
There is also a book that seems language agnostic (correct me if I'm wrong) called Data Structures & Algorithm's, though I hear it's a bit dated, so you'll miss out on more recent structures.
Don't forget the internet has a plethora of information available to you. However, books are usually better for these sorts of things. This is because internet resources tend to focus on one thing at a time. For example, you need to understand what Big-O notation is before you can understand what it means when we say a List has O(1) [constant time] removal.
A book will cover these things in the correct order, but an internet resource will focus on either Big-O notation or data structures, but often won't easily connect the two.
When it comes to using it, you'll mostly make the connection when it comes to what you'll be doing with the data.
For example, you might want a vector (array) if you just need ordered elements, but if you need ordered elements and removal from any place (but can sacrifice random access), then a list would be more appropriate, due to it's constant-time removal.
For a reasonable (though far from perfect) book on implementing commonly used algorithms in C, try Sedgewick's Algorithms in C. Note that as for any technical subject,a paper book is likely to be far superior to any Web resources.
As to how to know when to use a specific algorithm, I'm afraid that is down to experience.
For an algortihms text, Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest's 'Introduction to Algorithms' is a good start. The pseudocode implementations are easy to translate to C. Two web resources with many links to documentation about algorithms and sample implementations are:
Stony Brook Algorithm Repository
NIST Directory of Data Structures and Algorithms
Algorithms in C by Sedgewick is a great place to start the investigation. Once you are familiar with what algorithms are available and what the performance characteristics of each are, you'll be able to see where to use each of them.
This is my collection of mostly math-related algorithms:
List of algorithms
FXT (math related)
Numerical Methods
Numerical Recipes in C
How do u know when and where to use
the implementation of algorithms by
just looking into the problems
It's called "pattern matching", once you've seen and solved lots of problems you start to recognize common things and you can reuse your previous knowledge.
By the way, I would recommend you before a good book just on algorithms before starting with algorithms in C, which are more difficult to implement and more error prone than in higher level language, and once you are very confident with the general procedures you can start to tweak and optimize them in C.
Many good resources have already been named, so I won't repeat them here.
As for how do you know what algorithm to use when?
You need to have a big enough tool box, which you will obtain by sitting down and slogging through a long list of basic (and them more esoteric) data structures and algorithms. You should try to get all the basics, but really only need a sample from the more specialized ones.
You need to understand what trade offs are available to you (time, code complexity, memory, single versus multiple passes, in-place versus copy, stable versus unstable sorts, etc. ad nauseum), and how the algorithms you study do on each of these. Again, this is just a case of much studying. Big-O is a place to start, but is not the end all and be all of this.
You need to get a feel for understanding what are the real limits you face when presented with a problem, and how to express these in terms of the algorithm trade offs mentioned above. This requires a degree of intuition, and is generally learned by practice over time.
It is worth implementing some things more then one way as you go along, to learn in your gut, what works and what doesn't.
It is worth reading code written by folks more experienced than yourself, to see how they think.
Good luck.
The Wikipedia List of Algorithms is also very handy reference.
And, if you want to get deeper -- The Art of Computer Programming (wikipedia ref).
Preferably after the Robert Sedgewick book already referred in multiple answers.
I read Pointers on C by Kenneth Reek recently. I thought I was pretty well versed in C, but this book gave me a few epiphanies, despite being aimed at beginners. The code examples are things of beauty (but not the fastest code on a x86-like CPU). It provide good implementations of many of the most common algorithms and data-structures that are in use, with excellent explanations about why they are implemented as they are (and sometimes code or suggestions for alternative implementations).
On the same page as your question: patterns for creating reusable code in C (that is what we all want, isn't it?), C Interfaces and Implementations: Techniques for Creating Reusable Software, by David R. Hanson. It has been a few years since I read it, and I don't have a copy to verify what I recall is correct, but if I remember correctly it deals with how to create good C API:s to data structures and algorithms, as well as giving example implementations of some of the most common algorithms.
Of topic: As I have mostly written throw-away programs in C for private use, this one helped me get rid of some bad coding habits as well as being an excellent C reference: C: A reference Manual. Reminds me that I ought to buy that one.
One needs experience to know which set of algorithms to use for a particular problem. Defining a goal will help. Speed, memory, robustness, solution quality ... are all factors in determining which algorithms to use. We could devise different solutions to the same problem given different set of factors and scenarios.
The Algorithm Design Manual is worth a look.
A easy method to learn algorithms is to use Wiki page, who is dedicated to some "classical" algorithms like search algorithms or for sort. The constructions of algorithms is based on ability to use different data structures, like linked lists or C. So, first try to implement different data structures like simple linked list or binary tree, and after try to use in different algorithms who is related to real life problems.