Entries by Rainer Grimm

Tasks

Tasks were one of the latest additions to the C++11 standard. They give you a better abstraction than threads. In the general case, they should be your first choice. 

Condition Variables

Condition variables allow us to synchronize threads via notifications. So, you can implement workflows like sender/receiver or producer/consumer. In such a workflow, the receiver waits for the sender’s notification. If the receiver gets the notification, it continues its work.

The Risks of Mutexes

The usage of mutexes seems extremely simple. There is a critical section in the code that a single thread can only access at any point in time. It’s ensured by a mutex m. The calls m.lock() and m.unlock() guarantee this exclusivity. But the devil is in the details.