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 APIs

The following sections will explain, in detail, the different socket APIs.

The socket() API

All POSIX socket programming starts with the creation of a socket file descriptor using the socket() API, which takes the following form:

int socket(int domain, int type, int protocol);

The domain defines the address type used when creating the socket. In most cases, this would be AF_INET for IPv4 or AF_INET6 for IPv6. In the case of our examples in this chapter, we will use AF_INET. The type field usually takes on SOCK_STREAM for a TCP connection or SOCK_DGRAM for a UDP connection, both of which will be demonstrated in this chapter. Finally, the protocol field in this API will be set to 0 in all of our examples...