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

Sharing data between threads


We have seen how to start a thread and different methods of managing them. Now, let's discuss how to share data between threads. One key feature of concurrency is its ability to share data between the threads in action. First, let's see what the problems associated with threads accessing common (shared) data are.

There won't be a problem if the data shared between threads is immutable (read-only), because the data read by one thread is unaffected by whether the other threads are reading the same data or not. The moment threads start modifying shared data is when problems begin to emerge.

For example, if the threads are accessing a common data structure, the invariants associated with the data structure are broken if an update is happening. In this case, the number of elements is stored in the data structure, which usually requires the modification of more than one value. Consider the delete operation of a self-balancing tree or a doubly linked list. If you don...