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Thinking in C++ Vol 2 - Practical Programming
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Concurrency in C++

When the C++ Standards Committee was creating the initial C++ Standard, a concurrency mechanism was explicitly excluded because C didn t have one and also because there were a number of competing approaches to implementing concurrency. It seemed too much of a constraint to force programmers to use only one of these.

The alternative turned out to be worse, however. To use concurrency, you had to find and learn a library and deal with its idiosyncrasies and the uncertainties of working with a particular vendor. In addition, there was no guarantee that such a library would work on different compilers or across different platforms. Also, since concurrency was not part of the standard language, it was more difficult to find C++ programmers who also understood concurrent programming.

Another influence may have been the Java language, which included concurrency in the core language. Although multithreading is still complicated, Java programmers tend to start learning and using it from the beginning.

The C++ Standards Committee is considering the addition of concurrency support to the next iteration of C++, but at the time of this writing it is unclear what the library will look like. We decided to use the ZThread library as the basis for this chapter. We preferred the design, and it is open-source and freely available at https://zthread.sourceforge.net. Eric Crahen of IBM, the author of the ZThread library, was instrumental in creating this chapter.[150]

This chapter uses only a subset of the ZThread library, in order to convey the fundamental ideas of threading. The ZThread library contains significantly more sophisticated thread support than is shown here, and you should study that library further in order to fully understand its capabilities.

Thinking in C++ Vol 2 - Practical Programming
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   Reproduced courtesy of Bruce Eckel, MindView, Inc. Design by Interspire