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

Defining processes and threads


Essentially, to the operating system (OS), a process consists of one or more threads, each thread processing its own state and variables. One would regard this as a hierarchical configuration, with the OS as the foundation, providing support for the running of (user) processes. Each of these processes then consists of one or more threads. Communication between processes is handled by inter-process communication (IPC), which is provided by the operating system.

In a graphical view, this looks like the following:

Each process within the OS has its own state, with each thread in a process having its own state as well as the relative to the other threads within that same process. While IPC allows processes to communicate with each other, threads can communicate with other threads within the process in a variety of ways, which we'll explore in more depth in upcoming chapters. This generally involves some kind of shared memory between threads.

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