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 (11 chapters)
8
Atomic Operations - Working with the Hardware

The stack


As we saw in the preceding sections, the stack together with the CPU registers define a task. As mentioned earlier, this stack consists of stack frames, each of which defines the (local) variables, parameters, data, and instructions for that particular instance of task execution. Of note is that although the stack and stack frames are primarily a software concept, it is an essential feature of any modern OS, with hardware support in many CPU instruction sets. Graphically, it can be be visualized like the following:

The SP (ESP on x86) points to the top of the stack, with another pointer (Extended Base Pointer (EBP) for x86). Each frame contains a reference to the preceding frame (caller return address), as set by the OS.

When using a debugger with one's C++ application, this is basically what one sees when requesting the backtrack--the individual frames of the stack showing the initial stack frame leading up until the current frame. Here, one can examine each individual frame's details...