System programming

Since C++11, the standard library proposes to act as a proxy to interact with different aspects of operating systems.

Advantages

This brings several advantages:

Code portability since the standard library is an manufacturer-independent ISO standard, abstracting systems calls of most commonoperating systems (Unix, MACOS, Windows, etc)
Efficiency as the standard library is based on templates and do not add overheads.
Elegance as the standard library is particularty well designed (move semantics, etc)

Threads (file thread) to have several asynchronous execution threads that can truly run in parallel with the advent of multicore architectures
Thread synchronization mechanisms including:
- Locks on mutexes (file mutex) to make synchronous the access to shared ressources and to protect from race conditions.
- Variable conditions (file condition_variable) to signal events between threads.
- Futures (file future) to easily transmit from one thread to another data or exceptions resulting from parallel computation.
- Counting semaphores (C++20, file semaphore) to count on limited ressources.
- Latches (C++20, file latch) and barriers (C++20, file barrier) to synchronize a pool of threads.
- Atomics (file atomic) to control processor pipelines and ensure lock-free synchronous access to memory.
Clocks and timers (file chrono) to sleep for delays, to measure times, etc.
File systems (C++17, file filesystem) to interact with file systems in a standard way (file removal, directory management, etc).

Network streams. Use instead Boost project Boost.Asio for an excellent portable implementation of network sockets (in synchronous and asynchronous modes)

Frédéric Pennerath,