Book Image

Boost C++ Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Anton Polukhin Alekseevic
Book Image

Boost C++ Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Anton Polukhin Alekseevic

Overview of this book

If you want to take advantage of the real power of Boost and C++ and avoid the confusion about which library to use in which situation, then this book is for you. Beginning with the basics of Boost C++, you will move on to learn how the Boost libraries simplify application development. You will learn to convert data such as string to numbers, numbers to string, numbers to numbers and more. Managing resources will become a piece of cake. You’ll see what kind of work can be done at compile time and what Boost containers can do. You will learn everything for the development of high quality fast and portable applications. Write a program once and then you can use it on Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android operating systems. From manipulating images to graphs, directories, timers, files, networking – everyone will find an interesting topic. Be sure that knowledge from this book won’t get outdated, as more and more Boost libraries become part of the C++ Standard.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Creating work_queue class


Let's call the functional object that takes no arguments (a task, for short).

typedef boost::function<void()> task_t; 

Now, imagine a situation where we have threads that post tasks and threads that execute posted tasks. We need to design a class that can be safely used by both types of those threads. This class must have functions for:

  • Getting a task or waiting for a task till it is posted by another thread
  • Checking and getting a task if we have one (returning an empty task if no tasks remain)
  • Posting tasks

Getting ready

Make sure that you feel comfortable with boost::thread or std::thread , know basics of mutexes, and are aware of boost::function or std::function.

How to do it...

The class that we are going to implement is close by functionality to std::queue<task_t> but also has thread synchronization. Let's start:

  1. We need the following headers and members:
#include <deque>
#include <boost/function.hpp>
#include <boost/thread/mutex.hpp>
#include...