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)

Learning to Program POSIX and C++ Threads

In this chapter, the reader will learn how to program both POSIX and C++ threads. We will start by discussing how to program with POSIX threads, and then move on to C++ threads, providing a comparison of the APIs for each one.

Then we will present three examples. The first will demonstrate how to use threading to perform a parallel computation. The second will demonstrate how to create your own high-resolution timer using threading in order to perform benchmarking (albeit a timer that is likely not very accurate).

The third and final example will build upon our existing debugging example to provide support for multiple clients.

It should be noted that this chapter assumes the reader already has a basic understanding of threading, thread synchronization, and the challenges associated with race conditions and deadlock. Here, we will only...