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 2011 standard


The 2011 revision to the C++ standard (commonly referred to as C++11) adds a wide range of new features, the most crucial one being the addition of native multithreading support, which adds the ability to create, manage, and use threads within C++ without the use of third-party libraries.

This standard standardizes the memory model for the core language to allow multiple threads to coexist as well as enables features such as thread-local storage. Initial support was added in the C++03 standard, but the C++11 standard is the first to make full use of this.

As noted earlier, the actual threading API itself is implemented in the STL. One of the goals for the C++11 (C++0x) standard was to have as many of the new features as possible in the STL, and not as part of the core language. As a result, in order to use threads, mutexes, and kin, one has to first include the relevant STL header.

The standards committee which worked on the new multithreading API each had their own sets of...