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 Be sure that knowledge from this book won’t get outdated, as more and more Boost libraries become part of the C++ Standard.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 a thread of execution


On modern multi-core compilers, to achieve maximal performance (or just to provide a good user experience), programs usually use multiple threads of execution. Here is a motivating example in which we need to create and fill a big file in a thread that draws the user interface:

#include <cstddef> // for std::size_t

bool is_first_run(); 

// Function that executes for a long time.
void fill_file(char fill_char, std::size_t size, const char* filename);

// Called in thread that draws a user interface:
void example_without_threads() {
    if (is_first_run()) {
        // This will be executing for a long time during which
        // users interface freezes...
        fill_file(0, 8 * 1024 * 1024, "save_file.txt");
    }
}

Getting ready

This recipe requires knowledge of boost::bind or std::bind.

How to do it...

Starting a thread of execution was never so easy:

#include <boost/thread.hpp> 

// Called in thread that draws a user interface:
void example_with_threads...