Blog Archive for / 2009 / 02 /

Multithreading in C++0x part 3: Starting Threads with Member Functions and Reference Arguments

Thursday, 26 February 2009

This is the third of a series of blog posts introducing the new C++0x thread library. The first two parts covered Starting Threads in C++0x with simple functions, and starting threads with function objects and additional arguments.

If you've read the previous parts of the series then you've seen how to start threads with functions and function objects, with and without additional arguments. However, the function objects and arguments are always copied into the thread's internal storage. What if you wish to run a member function other than the function call operator, or pass a reference to an existing object?

The C++0x library can handle both these cases: the use of member functions with std::thread requires an additional argument for the object on which to invoke the member function, and references are handled with std::ref. Let's take a look at some examples.

Invoking a member function on a new thread

Starting a new thread which runs a member function of an existing object: you just pass a pointer to the member function and a value to use as the this pointer for the object in to the std::thread constructor.

#include <thread>
#include <iostream>

class SayHello
{
public:
    void greeting() const
    {
        std::cout<<"hello"<<std::endl;
    }
};

int main()
{
    SayHello x;
    std::thread t(&SayHello::greeting,&x);
    t.join();
}

You can of course pass additional arguments to the member function too:

#include <thread>
#include <iostream>

class SayHello
{
public:
    void greeting(std::string const& message) const
    {
        std::cout<<message<<std::endl;
    }
};

int main()
{
    SayHello x;
    std::thread t(&SayHello::greeting,&x,"goodbye");
    t.join();
}

Now, the preceding examples both a plain pointer to a local object for the this argument; if you're going to do that, you need to ensure that the object outlives the thread, otherwise there will be trouble. An alternative is to use a heap-allocated object and a reference-counted pointer such as std::shared_ptr<SayHello> to ensure that the object stays around as long as the thread does:

#include <>

int main()
{
    std::shared_ptr<SayHello> p(new SayHello);
    std::thread t(&SayHello::greeting,p,"goodbye");
    t.join();
}

So far, everything we've looked at has involved copying the arguments and thread functions into the internal storage of a thread even if those arguments are pointers, as in the this pointers for the member functions. What if you want to pass in a reference to an existing object, and a pointer just won't do? That is the task of std::ref.

Passing function objects and arguments to a thread by reference

Suppose you have an object that implements the function call operator, and you wish to invoke it on a new thread. The thing is you want to invoke the function call operator on this particular object rather than copying it. You could use the member function support to call operator() explicitly, but that seems a bit of a mess given that it is callable already. This is the first instance in which std::ref can help — if x is a callable object, then std::ref(x) is too, so we can pass std::ref(x) as our function when we start the thread, as below:

#include <thread>
#include <iostream>
#include <functional> // for std::ref

class PrintThis
{
public:
    void operator()() const
    {
        std::cout<<"this="<<this<<std::endl;
    }
};

int main()
{
    PrintThis x;
    x();
    std::thread t(std::ref(x));
    t.join();
    std::thread t2(x);
    t2.join();
}

In this case, the function call operator just prints the address of the object. The exact form and values of the output will vary, but the principle is the same: this little program should output three lines. The first two should be the same, whilst the third is different, as it invokes the function call operator on a copy of x. For one run on my system it printed the following:

this=0x7fffb08bf7ef
this=0x7fffb08bf7ef
this=0x42674098

Of course, std::ref can be used for other arguments too — the following code will print "x=43":

#include <thread>
#include <iostream>
#include <functional>

void increment(int& i)
{
    ++i;
}

int main()
{
    int x=42;
    std::thread t(increment,std::ref(x));
    t.join();
    std::cout<<"x="<<x<<std::endl;
}

When passing in references like this (or pointers for that matter), you need to be careful not only that the referenced object outlives the thread, but also that appropriate synchronization is used. In this case it is fine, because we only access x before we start the thread and after it is done, but concurrent access would need protection with a mutex.

Next time

That wraps up all the variations on starting threads; next time we'll look at using mutexes to protect data from concurrent modification.

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Try it out

If you're using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or g++ 4.3 or 4.4 on Ubuntu Linux you can try out the examples from this series using our just::thread implementation of the new C++0x thread library. Get your copy today.

Multithreading in C++0x Series

Here are the posts in this series so far:

Posted by Anthony Williams
[/ threading /] permanent link
Tags: concurrency, multithreading, C++0x, thread
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Multithreading in C++0x part 2: Starting Threads with Function Objects and Arguments

Tuesday, 17 February 2009

This is the second of a series of blog posts introducing the new C++0x thread library. If you missed the first part, it covered Starting Threads in C++0x with simple functions.

If you read part 1 of this series, then you've seen how easy it is to start a thread in C++0x: just construct an instance of std::thread, passing in the function you wish to run on the new thread. Though this is good, it would be quite limiting if new threads were constrained to run plain functions without any arguments — all the information needed would have to be passed via global variables, which would be incredibly messy. Thankfully, this is not the case. Not only can you run function objects on your new thread, as well as plain functions, but you can pass arguments in too.

Running a function object on another thread

In keeping with the rest of the C++ standard library, you're not limited to plain functions when starting threads — the std::thread constructor can also be called with instances of classes that implement the function-call operator. Let's say "hello" from our new thread using a function object:

#include <thread>
#include <iostream>

class SayHello
{
public:
    void operator()() const
    {
        std::cout<<"hello"<<std::endl;
    }
};

int main()
{
    std::thread t((SayHello()));
    t.join();
}

If you're wondering about the extra parentheses around the SayHello constructor call, this is to avoid what's known as C++'s most vexing parse: without the parentheses, the declaration is taken to be a declaration of a function called t which takes a pointer-to-a-function-with-no-parameters-returning-an-instance-of-SayHello, and which returns a std::thread object, rather than an object called t of type std::thread. There are a few other ways to avoid the problem. Firstly, you could create a named variable of type SayHello and pass that to the std::thread constructor:

int main()
{
    SayHello hello;
    std::thread t(hello);
    t.join();
}

Alternatively, you could use copy initialization:

int main()
{
    std::thread t=std::thread(SayHello());
    t.join();
}

And finally, if you're using a full C++0x compiler then you can use the new initialization syntax with braces instead of parentheses:

int main()
{
    std::thread t{SayHello()};
    t.join();
}

In this case, this is exactly equivalent to our first example with the double parentheses.

Anyway, enough about initialization. Whichever option you use, the idea is the same: your function object is copied into internal storage accessible to the new thread, and the new thread invokes your operator(). Your class can of course have data members and other member functions too, and this is one way of passing data to the thread function: pass it in as a constructor argument and store it as a data member:

#include <thread>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>

class Greeting
{
    std::string message;
public:
    explicit Greeting(std::string const& message_):
        message(message_)
    {}
    void operator()() const
    {
        std::cout<<message<<std::endl;
    }
};

int main()
{
    std::thread t(Greeting("goodbye"));
    t.join();
}

In this example, our message is stored as a data member in the class, so when the Greeting instance is copied into the thread the message is copied too, and this example will print "goodbye" rather than "hello".

This example also demonstrates one way of passing information in to the new thread aside from the function to call — include it as data members of the function object. If this makes sense in terms of the function object then it's ideal, otherwise we need an alternate technique.

Passing Arguments to a Thread Function

As we've just seen, one way to pass arguments in to the thread function is to package them in a class with a function call operator. Well, there's no need to write a special class every time; the standard library provides an easy way to do this in the form of std::bind. The std::bind function template takes a variable number of parameters. The first is always the function or callable object which needs the parameters, and the remainder are the parameters to pass when calling the function. The result is a function object that stores copies of the supplied arguments, with a function call operator that invokes the bound function. We could therefore use this to pass the message to write to our new thread:

#include <thread>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <functional>

void greeting(std::string const& message)
{
    std::cout<<message<<std::endl;
}

int main()
{
    std::thread t(std::bind(greeting,"hi!"));
    t.join();
}

This works well, but we can actually do better than that — we can pass the arguments directly to the std::thread constructor and they will be copied into the internal storage for the new thread and supplied to the thread function. We can thus write the preceding example more simply as:

#include <thread>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>

void greeting(std::string const& message)
{
    std::cout<<message<<std::endl;
}

int main()
{
    std::thread t(greeting,"hi!");
    t.join();
}

Not only is this code simpler, it's also likely to be more efficient as the supplied arguments can be copied directly into the internal storage for the thread rather than first into the object generated by std::bind, which is then in turn copied into the internal storage for the thread.

Multiple arguments can be supplied just by passing further arguments to the std::thread constructor:

#include <thread>
#include <iostream>

void write_sum(int x,int y)
{
    std::cout<<x<<" + "<<y<<" = "<<(x+y)<<std::endl;
}

int main()
{
    std::thread t(write_sum,123,456);
    t.join();
}

The std::thread constructor is a variadic template, so it can take any number of arguments up to the compiler's internal limit, but if you need to pass more than a couple of parameters to your thread function then you might like to rethink your design.

Next time

We're not done with starting threads just yet — there's a few more nuances to passing arguments which we haven't covered. In the third part of this series we'll look at passing references, and using class member functions as the thread function.

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Try it out

Multithreading in C++0x Series

Here are the posts in this series so far:

Posted by Anthony Williams
[/ threading /] permanent link
Tags: concurrency, multithreading, C++0x, thread
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Multithreading in C++0x part 1: Starting Threads

Tuesday, 10 February 2009

This is the first of a series of blog posts introducing the new C++0x thread library.

Concurrency and multithreading is all about running multiple pieces of code in parallel. If you have the hardware for it in the form of a nice shiny multi-core CPU or a multi-processor system then this code can run truly in parallel, otherwise it is interleaved by the operating system — a bit of one task, then a bit of another. This is all very well, but somehow you have to specify what code to run on all these threads.

High level constructs such as the parallel algorithms in Intel's Threading Building Blocks manage the division of code between threads for you, but we don't have any of these in C++0x. Instead, we have to manage the threads ourselves. The tool for this is std::thread.

Running a simple function on another thread

Let's start by running a simple function on another thread, which we do by constructing a new std::thread object, and passing in the function to the constructor. std::thread lives in the <thread> header, so we'd better include that first.

#include <thread>

void my_thread_func()
{}

int main()
{
    std::thread t(my_thread_func);
}

If you compile and run this little app, it won't do a lot: though it starts a new thread, the thread function is empty. Let's make it do something, such as print "hello":

#include <thread>
#include <iostream>

void my_thread_func()
{
    std::cout<<"hello"<<std::endl;
}

int main()
{
    std::thread t(my_thread_func);
}

If you compile and run this little application, what happens? Does it print hello like we wanted? Well, actually there's no telling. It might do or it might not. I ran this simple application several times on my machine, and the output was unreliable: sometimes it output "hello", with a newline; sometimes it output "hello" without a newline, and sometimes it didn't output anything. What's up with that? Surely a simple app like this ought to behave predictably?

Waiting for threads to finish

Well, actually, no, this app does not have predictable behaviour. The problem is we're not waiting for our thread to finish. When the execution reaches the end of main() the program is terminated, whatever the other threads are doing. Since thread scheduling is unpredictable, we cannot know how far the other thread has got. It might have finished, it might have output the "hello", but not processed the std::endl yet, or it might not have even started. In any case it will be abruptly stopped as the application exits.

If we want to reliably print our message, we have to ensure that our thread has finished. We do that by joining with the thread by calling the join() member function of our thread object:

#include <thread>
#include <iostream>

void my_thread_func()
{
    std::cout<<"hello"<<std::endl;
}

int main()
{
    std::thread t(my_thread_func);
    t.join();
}

Now, main() will wait for the thread to finish before exiting, and the code will output "hello" followed by a newline every time. This highlights a general point: if you want a thread to have finished by a certain point in your code you have to wait for it. As well as ensuring that threads have finished by the time the program exits, this is also important if a thread has access to local variables: we want the thread to have finished before the local variables go out of scope.

Next Time

In this article we've looked at running simple functions on a separate thread, and waiting for the thread to finish. However, when you start a thread you aren't just limited to simple functions with no arguments: in the second part of this series we will look at how to start a thread with function objects, and how to pass arguments to the thread.

Subscribe to the RSS feed or email newsletter for this blog to be sure you don't miss the rest of the series.

Try it out

Multithreading in C++0x Series

Here are the posts in this series so far:

Posted by Anthony Williams
[/ threading /] permanent link
Tags: concurrency, multithreading, C++0x, thread
Stumble It! | Submit to Reddit | Submit to DZone

Comment on this post

If you liked this post, why not subscribe to the RSS feed or Follow me on Twitter? You can also subscribe to this blog by email using the form on the left.

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Blog Archive for / 2009 / 02 /

Multithreading in C++0x part 3: Starting Threads with Member Functions and Reference Arguments

Thursday, 26 February 2009

Invoking a member function on a new thread

Passing function objects and arguments to a thread by reference

Next time

Try it out

Multithreading in C++0x Series

Multithreading in C++0x part 2: Starting Threads with Function Objects and Arguments

Tuesday, 17 February 2009

Running a function object on another thread

Passing Arguments to a Thread Function

Next time

Try it out

Multithreading in C++0x Series

Multithreading in C++0x part 1: Starting Threads

Tuesday, 10 February 2009

Running a simple function on another thread

Waiting for threads to finish

Next Time

Try it out

Multithreading in C++0x Series