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)

A Comprehensive Look at Memory Management

In this chapter, we will step the reader through how to properly and safely perform C++-style memory management, while also adhering to the C++ Core Guidelines whenever possible, leveraging additions to the C++ standard template library in C++11, C++14, and C++17 to increase the safety, reliability, and stability of the reader's system program. We will start by first introducing the new() and delete() functions, and how they may be used to allocate type-safe memory, including aligned memory. Next, this chapter will discuss the safety issues with using new() and delete() directly and how these safety concern may be handled using smart pointers, including their impact on C++ Core Guideline compliance. How to perform memory mapping and permissions will also be discussed, with the chapter concluding with a brief discussion on fragmentation...