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Phase 4: Comprehensive Practice

Phase 4 integrates all the skills learned in the previous phases to build complete, production-quality applications. These projects combine system programming, network programming, and performance optimization techniques into comprehensive solutions.

Learning Objectives​

By the end of Phase 4, you will:

  • Design and implement complex C++ applications that combine multiple technologies
  • Apply architectural patterns for large-scale systems
  • Optimize performance using techniques from all previous phases
  • Implement complete solutions with proper error handling and testing
  • Build applications with real-world utility and performance requirements
  • Demonstrate mastery of modern C++ in complex systems

Projects in This Phase​

This phase consists of three major projects:

  1. mini-Redis: An in-memory key-value store with Redis-like commands and persistence
  2. mini-Search: A search engine implementation with indexing and querying capabilities
  3. High-concurrency Crawler: A web crawler that can efficiently crawl and index large numbers of URLs

Each project requires combining knowledge from all previous phases into comprehensive solutions.

Integration Concepts Covered​

  • System Architecture: Designing multi-component systems
  • Performance Optimization: Applying all learned optimization techniques
  • Concurrency Patterns: Advanced threading and synchronization
  • Memory Management: Efficient memory usage in long-running applications
  • Network Protocols: Implementing complete network services
  • Data Structures: Using appropriate structures for specific use cases
  • Persistence: Implementing data storage and retrieval mechanisms

Development Environment​

Continue using the Docker development environment for consistency:

# Enter development container
./scripts/docker-dev.sh exec

# Navigate to project root
cd /app

# Build Phase 4 projects
cd build
cmake ..
make -j4

Testing Strategy​

For comprehensive projects, testing involves:

  1. Unit tests for individual components
  2. Integration tests for system behavior
  3. Performance benchmarks to validate design decisions
  4. Stress testing with high concurrency
  5. End-to-end functionality testing
  6. Memory leak and resource management verification

Run comprehensive tests with:

./scripts/docker-dev.sh test

Next Steps​

Begin with the mini-Redis project to build an in-memory data store!