Book Image

C++ System Programming Cookbook

By : Onorato Vaticone
Book Image

C++ System Programming Cookbook

By: Onorato Vaticone

Overview of this book

C++ is the preferred language for system programming due to its efficient low-level computation, data abstraction, and object-oriented features. System programming is about designing and writing computer programs that interact closely with the underlying operating system and allow computer hardware to interface with the programmer and the user. The C++ System Programming Cookbook will serve as a reference for developers who want to have ready-to-use solutions for the essential aspects of system programming using the latest C++ standards wherever possible. This C++ book starts out by giving you an overview of system programming and refreshing your C++ knowledge. Moving ahead, you will learn how to deal with threads and processes, before going on to discover recipes for how to manage memory. The concluding chapters will then help you understand how processes communicate and how to interact with the console (console I/O). Finally, you will learn how to deal with time interfaces, signals, and CPU scheduling. By the end of the book, you will become adept at developing robust systems applications using C++.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Learning how atomic works

Traditionally, C and C++ have a long tradition of portable code for system programming. The atomic feature that was introduced in the C++11 standard reinforces this by adding, natively, the guarantee that an operation is seen as atomic by other threads. Atomic is a template, such as template <class T> struct atomic; or template <class T> struct atomic<T*>;. C++20 has added shared_ptr and weak_ptr to T and T*. Any operation that's performed on the atomic variable is now protected from other threads.

How to do it...

std::atomic is an important aspect of modern C++ for dealing with concurrency. Let's write some code to master the...