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 the POSIX standard

The POSIX standard defines all of the functionality a POSIX-compliant operating system must implement. With respect to system programming, the POSIX standard defines the system call interface (that is, the APIs, not the ABIs) that the operating system must support.

Under the hood, most of the system-level APIs that C and C++ provide actually execute POSIX functions, or are POSIX functions themselves (as is this case with a lot of C library APIs). In fact, libc is generally considered to be a subset of the greater POSIX standard, while C++ leverages libc and POSIX to implement its higher-level APIs such as threading, memory management, error handling, file operations, and input/output. For more information, refer to https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8277153/.

In this section, we will discuss some components of the POSIX standard that are relevant...