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

Thread class


The thread class is the core of the entire threading API; it wraps the underlying operating system's threads, and provides the functionality we need to start and stop threads.

This functionality is made accessible by including the <thread> header.

Basic use

Upon creating a thread it is started immediately:

#include <thread> 

void worker() { 
   // Business logic. 
} 

int main () { 
   std::thread t(worker);
   return 0; 
} 

This preceding code would start the thread to then immediately terminate the application, because we are not waiting for the new thread to finish executing.

To do this properly, we need to wait for the thread to finish, or rejoin as follows:

#include <thread> 

void worker() { 
   // Business logic. 
} 

int main () { 
   std::thread t(worker); 
   t.join(); 
   return 0; 
} 

This last code would execute, wait for the new thread to finish, and then return.

Passing parameters

It's also possible to pass parameters to a new thread. These parameter...