What are the tradeoffs b/w boost::thread
, std::thread
(C++11), and pthread
for high CPU throughput (read: lots of floating point operations) Linux based applications? When should one implementation be used over the others?
The use case here is to call a routine on a buffer (or pointer to a buffer) of contiguous memory, do some work, and return -- in a multithreaded implementation.
std::thread
std::thread::native_handle
.boost::thread
pthread
:
When should one implementation be used over the others?
std::thread
is often a good default. If you need features of pthread
that are not in the standard, you can use them with the help of std::thread::native_handle
(with the implications on the portability that come with it). There's no reason to use pthread
directly otherwise (that I know of) in C++.
boost::thread
can be used if you need ancient pre-C++11 support, to remain portable to other systems.
Note that std::thread
itself doesn't need to be used directly. The standard has useful abstractions such as std::reduce
, std::packaged_task
, std::async
, parallel execution policies for algorithms etc.