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)

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to perform console-based IO, a common system-programming requirement, using C++17. Unlike standard C-style IO functions, such as printf() and scanf(), C++ uses stream-based IO functions, such as std::cout and std::cin. There are many advantages and some disadvantages to using stream-based IO. For example, stream-based IO provides a type-safe mechanism for performing IO, while raw, POSIX-style write() functions can often outperform stream-based IO due to a lack of calls to malloc() and free().

In addition, we looked at stream-based manipulators, which provide stream-based IO with a similar feature set to standard C-style format strings, but without the common instability issues found with the C equivalents. In addition to manipulating the format of numbers and Boolean values, we explored field properties, including width and justification...