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

Windows threads


Relative to Pthreads, Windows threads are limited to Windows operating systems and similar (for example ReactOS, and other OS's using Wine). This provides a fairly consistent implementation, easily defined by the Windows version that the support corresponds to.

Prior to Windows Vista, threading support missed features such as condition variables, while having features not found in Pthreads. Depending on one's perspective, having to use the countless "type def" types defined by the Windows headers can be a bother as well.

Thread management

A basic example of using Windows threads, as adapted from the official MSDN documentation sample code, looks like this:

#include <windows.h> 
#include <tchar.h> 
#include <strsafe.h> 

#define MAX_THREADS 3 
#define BUF_SIZE 255  

After including a series of Windows-specific headers for the thread functions, character strings, and more, we define the number of threads we wish to create as well as the size of the message buffer...