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)

Studying an example of a stateful, memory–pool allocator

In this example, we will create a far more complicated allocator, called a pool allocator. The goal of the pool allocator is to quickly allocate memory for a fixed-size type while simultaneously (and more importantly) reducing internal fragmentation of memory (that is, the amount of memory that is wasted by each allocation, even if the allocation size is not a multiple of two or some other optimized allocation size).

Memory-pool allocators are so useful that some implementations of C++ already contain pool allocators. In addition, C++17 technically has support for a pool allocator in something called a polymorphic allocator (which is not covered in this book, as no major implementations of C++17 have support for polymorphic allocators at the time of writing), and most operating systems leverage pool allocators within...