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

Shared mutex


The <shared_mutex> header was first added with the 2014 standard, by adding the shared_timed_mutex class. With the 2017 standard, the shared_mutex class was also added.

The shared mutex header has been present since C++17. In addition to the usual mutual exclusive access, this mutex class adds the ability to provide shared access to the mutex. This allows one to, for example, provide read access to a resource by multiple threads, while a writing thread would still be able to gain exclusive access. This is similar to the read-write locks of Pthreads.

The functions added to this mutex type are the following:

  • lock_shared()
  • try_lock_shared()
  • unlock_shared()

The use of this mutex's share functionality should be fairly self-explanatory. A theoretically infinite number of readers can gain read access to the mutex, while ensuring that only a single thread can write to the resource at any time.

Shared timed mutex

This header has been present since C++14. It adds shared locking functionality...