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)

Dealing with allocators hands-on

C++ Standard Template Library (STL) containers are a simple, as well as effective, way of managing resources. One huge benefit of containers is that they can manage (almost) any type of data. When dealing with system programming, though, we may need to provide an alternative way of managing memory for our container. Allocators are exactly this: they provide a custom implementation to a container.

How to do it...

In this recipe, you'll learn to implement your own custom allocator (based on mmap, in this case) to provide to a standard library container (std::vector):

  1. Let's create an empty allocator template first:
template<typename T>
class mmap_allocator
{
public...