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

Locks are fancy mutexes


As we saw earlier in the section on mutexes, there are some issues to keep in mind when using mutexes. Naturally these also apply when using locks and other mechanisms based on mutexes, even if some of these issues are smoothed over by these APIs.

One of the things one may get confused about when first using multithreading APIs is what the actual difference is between the different synchronization types. As we covered earlier in this chapter, mutexes underlie virtually all synchronization mechanisms, merely differing in the way that they use mutexes to implement the provided functionality.

The important thing here is that they are not distinct synchronization mechanisms, but merely specializations of the basic mutex type. Whether one would use a regular mutex, a read/write lock, a semaphore - or even something as esoteric as a reentrant (recursive) mutex or lock - depends fully on the particular problem which one is trying to solve.

For the scheduler, we first encountered...