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 multithreading


Over the past decades, a lot of different terms related to the way tasks are processed by a computer have been coined and come into common use. Many of these are also used interchangeably, correctly or not. An example of this is multithreading in comparison with multiprocessing.

Here, the latter means running one task per processor in a system with multiple physical processors, while the former means running multiple tasks on a singular processor simultaneously, thus giving the illusion that they are all being executed simultaneously:

Another interesting distinction between multiprocessing and multitasking is that the latter uses time-slices in order to run multiple threads on a single processor core. This is different from multithreading in the sense that in a multitasking system, no tasks will ever run in a concurrent fashion on the same CPU core, though tasks can still be interrupted.

The concept of a process and a shared memory space between the threads contained...