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

Threads versus the future


Recently it has become popular to advise against the use of threads, instead advocating the use of other asynchronous processing mechanisms, such as promise. The reasons behind this are that the use of threads and the synchronization involved is complex and error-prone. Often one just wants to run a task in parallel and not concern oneself with how the result is obtained.

For simple tasks which would run only briefly, this can certainly make sense. The main advantage of a thread-based implementation will always be that one can fully customize its behavior. With a promise, one sends in a task to run and at the end, one gets the result out of a future instance. This is convenient for simple tasks, but obviously does not cover a lot of situations.

The best approach here is to first learn threads and synchronization mechanisms well, along with their limitations. Only after that does it really make sense to consider whether one wishes to use a promise, packaged_task, or...