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

The data flow computation paradigm


Traditionally, programmers encode computer programs in terms of control flow. That means we encode programs as a series of small statements (sequence, branching, iteration) or functions (including recursive), with their associated states. We use constructs, such as selection (if/else), iteration (while/for), and functions (recursive functions as well), to encode our computation. Handling concurrency and state management for these types of program are really difficult and they lead to subtle bugs while managing state information which are mutable in nature. We need to place locks and other synchronization primitives around shared mutable states. At the compiler level, the language compiler will parse the source code to generate an abstract syntax tree (AST), do type analysis, and code generation. In fact, AST is an information flow graph where you can perform data-flow analysis (for data/register level optimization) and control-flow analysis to exploit code...