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)

Learning about stream-based IO

In this section, we are going to learn about the basics and some advantages and disadvantages of stream-based IO.

The basics of stream

Unlike the C-style printf() and scanf() functions, C++ IO uses streams (std::ostream for output and std::istream for input) that leverage the << and >> operators. For example, the following code outputs Hello World to stdout using a non-member << overload of basic_ostream for const char * strings:

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
std::cout << "Hello World\n";
}

> g++ -std=c++17 scratchpad.cpp; ./a.out
Hello World

By default, the std::cout and std::wcout objects, which are instantiations of std::ostream, output data to the...