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

Dynamic analysis tools


Although the value of a debugger is hard to dismiss, there are times when one needs a different type of tool to answer questions about things such as memory usage, leaks, and to diagnose or prevent threading issues. This is where tools such as those which are part of the Valgrind suite of dynamic analysis tools can be of great help. As a framework for building dynamic analysis tools, the Valgrind distribution currently contains the following tools which are of interest to us:

  • Memcheck
  • Helgrind
  • DRD

Memcheck is a memory error detector, which allows us to discover memory leaks, illegal reads and writes, as well as allocation, deallocation, and similar memory-related issues.

Helgrind and DRD are both thread error detectors. This basically means that they will attempt to detect any multithreading issues such as data races and incorrect use of mutexes. Where they differ is that Helgrind can detect locking order violations, and DRD supports detached threads, while also using less...