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

Putting it together


Of the APIs covered in this chapter, only the Qt multithreading API can be considered to be truly high level. Although the other APIs (including C++11) have some higher-level concepts including thread pools and asynchronous runners which do not require one to use threads directly, Qt offers a full-blown signal-slot architecture, which makes inter-thread communication exceptionally easy.

As covered in this chapter, this ease also comes with a cost, namely, that of having to develop one's application to fit the Qt framework. This may not be acceptable depending on the project.

Which of these APIs is the right one depends on one's requirements. It is, however, relatively fair to say that using straight Pthreads, Windows threads, and kin does not make a lot of sense when one can use APIs such as C++11 threads, POCO, and so on, which ease the development process with no significant reduction in performance while also gaining extensive portability across platforms.

All the APIs...