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)

Understanding the logger example

In this section, we will extend the debugging example in Chapter 6, Learning to Program Console Input/Output, to include a rudimentary logger. The goal of this logger is to redirect additions to the std::clog stream to a log file in addition to the console.

Just like the debugging functions in Chapter 6, Learning to Program Console Input/Output, we would like the logging functions to be compiled out if the debugging level is not sufficient, or if debugging has been disabled.

To accomplish this, please see the following code: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Hands-On-System-Programming-with-CPP/blob/master/Chapter08/example1.cpp.

To start, we will need to create two constant expressions—one for the debug level, and one to enable or disable debugging outright, as follows:

#ifdef DEBUG_LEVEL
constexpr auto g_debug_level = DEBUG_LEVEL;
#else...