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)

Creating a new thread

Processes are not the only way of structuring a software system; a lightweight alternative is to use threads. This recipe shows how to create and manage threads using the C++ standard library. We've seen that the main advantages of using the C++ standard library are its portability and the fact that it's not dependent on external libraries (for example, Boost).

How to do it...

The code we'll write will be the concurrent version of summing up a large vector of integers. The vector is split into two parts; each thread calculates the sum of its part, and the main thread shows the result.

  1. Let's define a vector of 100,000 integers, and generate random numbers in the main method:
...