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 to use message queues

Another mechanism directly supported by POSIX-compliant operating systems (and then, the Linux kernel) is a message queue. A message queue, in its essence, is a linked list of messages stored in the kernel, where each queue is identified by an ID. In this recipe, we'll rewrite the chat program using a message queue, highlighting the key pros and cons.

How to do it...

In this section, we'll rewrite the chat program from the Learning how to use FIFO recipe. This will allow you to see, hands-on, similarities and differences between FIFO and a message queue:

  1. Create a new file called mq_chat_user_1.c, and add the following includes and defines:
#include <stdio.h>
#include...