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

When to start debugging


Ideally, one would test and validate one's code every time one has reached a certain milestone, whether it's for a singular module, a number of modules, or the application as a whole. It's important to ascertain that the assumptions one makes match up with the ultimate functionality.

Especially, with multithreaded code, there's a large element of coincidence in that a particular error state is not guaranteed to be reached during each run of the application. Signs of an improperly implemented multithreaded application may result in symptoms such as seemingly random crashes.

Likely the first hint one will get that something isn't correct is when the application crashes, and one is left with a core dump. This is a file which contains the memory content of the application at the time when it crashed, including the stack.

This core dump can be used in almost the same fashion as running a debugger with the running process. It is particularly useful to examine the location...