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

Safety first


The central problem with concurrency is that of ensuring safe access to shared resources even when communicating between threads. There is also the issue of threads being able to communicate and synchronize themselves.

What makes multithreaded programming such a challenge is to be able to keep track of each interaction between threads, and to ensure that each and every form of access is secured while not falling into the trap of deadlocks and data races.

In this chapter, we will look at a fairly complex example involving a task scheduler. This is a form of high-concurrency, high-throughput situation where many different requirements come together with many potential traps, as we will see in a moment.