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 Hands-On Approach to Allocators

In Chapter 7, A Comprehensive Look at Memory Management, we learned how to allocate and deallocate memory using C++-specific techniques, including the use of std::unique_ptr and std::shared_ptr. In addition, we learned about fragmentation and how it is capable of wasting large amounts of memory depending on how memory is allocated and then later deallocated. System programmers often have to allocate memory from different pools (sometimes originating from different sources), and handle fragmentation to prevent the system from running out of memory during operation. This is especially true for embedded programmers. Placement new() may be used to solve these types of issues, but implementations based on placement new are often hard to create and even harder to maintain. Placement new() is also only accessible from user-defined code, providing no...