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

Boost


Boost threads is a relatively small part of the Boost collection of libraries. It was, however, used as the basis for what became the multithreading implementation in C++11, similar to how other Boost libraries ultimately made it, fully or partially, into new C++ standards. Refer to the C++ threads section in this chapter for details on the multithreading API.

Features missing in the C++11 standard, which are available in Boost threads, include the following:

  • Thread groups (like Windows jobs)
  • Thread interruption (cancellation)
  • Thread join with timeout
  • Additional mutual exclusion lock types (improved with C++14)

Unless one absolutely needs such features, or if one cannot use a compiler which supports the C++11 standard (including STL threads), there is little reason to use Boost threads over the C++11 implementation.

Since Boost provides wrappers around native OS features, using native C++ threads would likely reduce overhead depending on the quality of the STL implementation.