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

Atomic operations


Briefly put, an atomic operation is an operation which the processor can execute with a single instruction. This makes it atomic in the sense that nothing (barring interrupts) can interfere with it, or change any variables or data it may be using.

Applications include guaranteeing the order of instruction execution, lock-free implementations, and related uses where instruction execution order and memory access guarantees are important.

Before the 2011 C++ standard, the access to such atomic operations as provided by the processor was only provided by the compiler, using extensions.

Visual C++

For Microsoft's MSVC compiler there are the interlocked functions, as summarized from the MSDN documentation, starting with the adding features:

Interlocked function

Description

InterlockedAdd

Performs an atomic addition operation on the specified LONG values.

InterlockedAddAcquire

Performs an atomic addition operation on the specified LONG values. The operation is performed with acquire memory...