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 manipulators

C++ streams have several different manipulators that may be used to control both input and output, some of which have already been discussed. The most common manipulator is std::endl, which outputs a newline and then flushes the output stream:

#include <iostream>

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

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

Another way to write this same logic is to use the std::flush manipulator:

#include <iostream>

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

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

Both are the same, although '\n' should always be used unless a flush is explicitly needed. For example, if multiple lines are needed, the following is preferred:

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
std::cout...