We’ve covered the “Assembly Language”, “C” and “C++” of the C++ threading world, and now we are going to try and move beyond that.
In the “C++” example we showed a object that automatically managed a thread’s life time and used the thread to calculate the Fibonacci sequence in the background. Using templates we should be able to make a generic version of the Fibonacci calculator thread. We will not go into all of the implementation details here, but will instead focus on the possibilities.
Future
A future is a method of letting a value calculate in the background and doing a block-wait for it when you want the value.
future<int> Fib1 = boost::bind(&calculatefib, 1);
future<int> Fib2 = boost::bind(&calculatefib, 2);
future<int> Fib3 = boost::bind(&calculatefib, 3);
Three threads were created in the above example and each began calculating its respective Fibonacci value. If the user were to try and access a future value the application would either return the value immediately if it were already available or block until it became available.
std::cout << Fib1 << std::endl; // Return immediately if the value is ready or wait for it to become ready
Worker
A worker performs work in the background, without handling a return value and cleans itself up when it goes out of scope.
vector parallelfibcalculator()
{
vector<int> values(4);
worker w0 = boost::bind(&calculatefib, 0, boost::ref(values[0]));
worker w1 = boost::bind(&calculatefib, 1, boost::ref(values[1]));
worker w2 = boost::bind(&calculatefib, 2, boost::ref(values[2]));
worker w3 = boost::bind(&calculatefib, 3, boost::ref(values[3]));
return values; // when w3-w0 try to destruct they will block until work is finished
}
Calling parallelfibcalculator() will spawn four threads for calculating the first four Fibonacci values then block until all four are completed.
These two examples are just a look at the possibilities. With a little creativity it is possible to come up with all kinds of automatic thread handlers that are suited to specific domain needs and simplify the use and management of threads.