Protothreads and Other Wicked C Tricks

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday October 6, 2005 @12:25PM from the working-as-intended dept.

lwb writes "For those of you interested in interesting hard-core C programming tricks: Adam Dunkels' protothreads library implements an unusually lightweight type of threads. Protothreads are not real threads, but rather something in between an event-driven state machine and regular threads. But they are implemented in 100% portable ANSI C and with an interesting but quite unintuitive use of the switch/case construct. The same trick has previously been used by Simon Tatham to implement coroutines in C. The trick was originally invented by Tom Duff and dubbed Duff's device. You either love it or you hate it!"

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Seen this already by Anonymous Coward · 2005-10-06 12:34 · Score: 5, Funny

I first came across this while I was working on the e-voting machines. There was a dept especially allocated to investigating how to hide certain features in c code to make them look like soemthing else.