Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with C++

By : Dr. Rian Quinn
Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with C++

By: Dr. Rian Quinn

Overview of this book

C++ is a general-purpose programming language with a bias toward system programming as it provides ready access to hardware-level resources, efficient compilation, and a versatile approach to higher-level abstractions. This book will help you understand the benefits of system programming with C++17. You will gain a firm understanding of various C, C++, and POSIX standards, as well as their respective system types for both C++ and POSIX. After a brief refresher on C++, Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII), and the new C++ Guideline Support Library (GSL), you will learn to program Linux and Unix systems along with process management. As you progress through the chapters, you will become acquainted with C++'s support for IO. You will then study various memory management methods, including a chapter on allocators and how they benefit system programming. You will also explore how to program file input and output and learn about POSIX sockets. This book will help you get to grips with safely setting up a UDP and TCP server/client. Finally, you will be guided through Unix time interfaces, multithreading, and error handling with C++ exceptions. By the end of this book, you will be comfortable with using C++ to program high-quality systems.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Beginning with POSIX sockets

Unfortunately, C++ does not contain a native networking library (something that will hopefully be addressed with C++20). For this reason, POSIX sockets are needed to perform networking with C++. The POSIX sockets API defines an API for sending and receiving network packets using the standard, Unix file-descriptor paradigm. When programming with sockets, both a server and a client must be created. Servers are responsible for binding a specific port to the socket protocol that is being developed by the user of the sockets library. Clients are any other application that is connected to a previously-bound port. Both servers and clients have their own IP addresses.

When programming sockets, besides picking address types, such as IPv4 versus IPv6, typically the programmer must also choose between UDP versus TCP. UDP is a connectionless protocol that provides...