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 endianness

Writing code at system level might mean dealing with different processors' architectures. When doing this, there is one thing that programmers had to take care of by themselves before C++20, which is endianness. Endianness refers to the byte's order in the binary representation of a number. Fortunately, the last C++ standard helps us to enter endian information at compile time. This recipe will teach you how to be aware of endianness and write code that can run on both little- and big-endian architecture.

How to do it...

We'll develop a program that will query the machine at compile time, so that we can make a conscious decision as to how to deal with numbers...