Book Image

Mastering C++ Multithreading

By : Maya Posch
Book Image

Mastering C++ Multithreading

By: Maya Posch

Overview of this book

Multithreaded applications execute multiple threads in a single processor environment, allowing developers achieve concurrency. This book will teach you the finer points of multithreading and concurrency concepts and how to apply them efficiently in C++. Divided into three modules, we start with a brief introduction to the fundamentals of multithreading and concurrency concepts. We then take an in-depth look at how these concepts work at the hardware-level as well as how both operating systems and frameworks use these low-level functions. In the next module, you will learn about the native multithreading and concurrency support available in C++ since the 2011 revision, synchronization and communication between threads, debugging concurrent C++ applications, and the best programming practices in C++. In the final module, you will learn about atomic operations before moving on to apply concurrency to distributed and GPGPU-based processing. The comprehensive coverage of essential multithreading concepts means you will be able to efficiently apply multithreading concepts while coding in C++.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
8
Atomic Operations - Working with the Hardware

The STL threading API


In Chapter 3, C++ Multithreading APIs, we looked at the various APIs that are available to us when developing a multithreaded C++ application. In Chapter 4, Thread Synchronization and Communication, we implemented a multithreaded scheduler application using the native C++ threading API.

Boost.Thread API

By including the <thread> header from the STL, we gain access to the std::thread class with facilities for mutual exclusion (mutex, and so on) provided by further headers. This API is, essentially, the same as the multithreading API from Boost.Thread, the main differences being more control over threads (join with timeout, thread groups, and thread interruption), and a number of additional lock types implemented on top of primitives such as mutexes and condition variables.

In general, Boost.Thread should be used as a fall back for when C++11 support isn't present, or when these additional Boost.Thread features are a requirement of one's application, and not easily...