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 the new and delete functions

In this section, the reader will learn how to allocate and deallocate memory using C++17. You will learn how to use new() and delete() instead of malloc()/free() to increase the type-safety of allocations and deallocations. Various versions of these functions will be explained, including array, aligned, and placement-style allocations.

The basics for writing a program

When writing a program, including system programming, there are a few different types of memory that can be leveraged by the author:

  • Global memory
  • Stack memory
  • Heap memory

Global memory exists in the program itself, is allocated by the OS's loader, and generally exists in two different locations (assuming ELF...