Book Image

C++ Reactive Programming

By : Praseed Pai, Peter Abraham
Book Image

C++ Reactive Programming

By: Praseed Pai, Peter Abraham

Overview of this book

Reactive programming is an effective way to build highly responsive applications with an easy-to-maintain code base. This book covers the essential functional reactive concepts that will help you build highly concurrent, event-driven, and asynchronous applications in a simpler and less error-prone way. C++ Reactive Programming begins with a discussion on how event processing was undertaken by different programming systems earlier. After a brisk introduction to modern C++ (C++17), you’ll be taken through language-level concurrency and the lock-free programming model to set the stage for our foray into the Functional Programming model. Following this, you’ll be introduced to RxCpp and its programming model. You’ll be able to gain deep insights into the RxCpp library, which facilitates reactive programming. You’ll learn how to deal with reactive programming using Qt/C++ (for the desktop) and C++ microservices for the Web. By the end of the book, you will be well versed with advanced reactive programming concepts in modern C++ (C++17).
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 3. Language-Level Concurrency and Parallelism in C++

C++ has had excellent support for concurrent programming ever since the C++ 11 language standard came out. Until then, threading was an affair that was handled by platform-specific libraries. The Microsoft Corporation had its own threading libraries, and other platforms (GNU Linux/macOS X) supported the POSIX threading model. A threading mechanism as part of the language has helped C++ programmers write portable code that runs on multiple platforms.

The original C++ standard was published in 1998, and the language design committee firmly believed that threading, filesystems, GUI libraries, and so on are better left to the platform-specific libraries. Herb Sutter published an influential article in the Dr. Dobbs Journal titled, The Free Lunch Is Over, where he advocated programming techniques to exploit multiple cores available in the processors of those days. While writing parallel code, functional programming models are well-suited...