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

Mutex


The <mutex> header contains multiple types of mutexes and locks. The mutex type is the most commonly used type, and provides the basic lock/unlock functionality without any further complications.

Basic use

At its core, the goal of a mutex is to exclude the possibility of simultaneous access so as to prevent data corruption, and to prevent crashes due to the use of non-thread-safe routines.

An example of where one would need to use a mutex is the following code:

#include <iostream> 
#include <thread> 

void worker(int i) { 
         std::cout << "Outputting this from thread number: " << i << "\n"; 
} 

int main() { 
         std::thread t1(worker, 1);
         std::thread t2(worker, 2); 

         t1.join(); 
   t2.join(); 

   return 0; 
} 

If one were to try and run this preceding code as-is, one would notice that the text output from both threads would be mashed together instead of being output one after the other. The reason for this is that the standard...