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)

Chapter 1

  1. The act of making system calls to accomplish tasks provided by the operating system is called system programming.
  2. By calling an operating system's interrupt handlers.
  3. Special instructions were added to the CPU to support system calls without the need to call an interrupt handler, which saves more of the CPU state prior to execution.
  4. No. Most implementations of malloc()/free() ask for a large amount of memory from the operating system and then divide up that memory during the program's execution. A system call is only needed when this memory runs out and malloc()/free() must ask for more.
  5. Speculative execution.
  6. Type safety is the extent to which a programming language helps to prevent errors due to the differences between types. Strongly typed languages prevent these types of error more than weakly typed languages.
  7. C++ templates provide a user with the...