Low level systems programming with C++

c++ systems-programming
Henry H picture Henry H · Nov 22, 2010 · Viewed 18.9k times · Source

I have been using C++ for a while now and I began to get interested in lower level system programming like drivers and stuff. Even some kind of primitive operating system could be very interesting project!

I have no clue where I could start. Are there any not-too-challenging things I could get started with and are there anything about C++ I should try to avoid like exceptions in performance critical code?

My current OS is Windows 7 if that matters much.

Answer

Hans Passant picture Hans Passant · Nov 22, 2010

Writing Windows device drivers in C++ isn't impossible, there are not many CRT functions that you could use to get you into trouble. The new operator is unusable for example, you don't have to fear a std::bad_alloc. Unless you replace it, that cuts out a rather large swath of standard C++ library classes.

But that's not really the point of a device driver, it is rather important that you make it as small as possible. C++ pays off when you write complex code. You explicitly do not want to write complex code in a device driver. Debugging it is redrum.

Linus really likes C in the kernel. There's a good reason for that.

Related questions

Programmatically get the cache line size?

All platforms welcome, please specify the platform for your answer. A similar question: How to programmatically get the CPU cache page size in C++?

Read More
What's the shortest code to write directly to a memory address in C/C++?

I'm writing system-level code for an embedded system without memory protection (on an ARM Cortex-M1, compiling with gcc 4.3) and need to read/write directly to a memory-mapped register. So far, my code looks like this: #define UART0 0x4000C000 #define …

Read More
On the use and abuse of alloca

I am working on a soft-realtime event processing system. I would like to minimise as many calls in my code that have non-deterministic timing. I need to construct a message that consists of strings, numbers, timestamps and GUID's. Probably a …

Read More