10 Years of Programming with POSIX Threads

Monday, 29 October 2007

David Butenhof's Programming with POSIX Threads was published 10 years ago, in 1997. At the time, it was the definitive work on the POSIX thread API, and multi-threaded programming in general. Ten years is a long time in computing so how does it fare today?

New POSIX Standard

When the book was written, the latest version of the POSIX Standard was the 1996 edition (ISO/IEC 9945-1:1996). Since then, the standard has evolved. It is now maintained by a joint working group from The Open Group, the IEEE and ISO called The Austin Group. The new Standard is called the Single Unix Specification, Version 3 and the 2004 edition is available online.

The new standard has brought a few changes with it — many things that were part of extensions such as POSIX 1003.1j are now part of the main ISO Standard. This includes barriers and read-write locks, though barriers are still optional and the read-write locks have a slightly different interface. Programming with POSIX threads is therefore lacking a good description of the now-standard APIs — although Butenhof devotes a section in Chapter 7 to implementing read-write locks, this is now only of historical interest, as the semantics are different from those in the new standard.

Most things stay the same

Though there are inevitably some changes with the new standard, most of the APIs remain the same. Not only that, the fundamental concepts described in the book haven't changed — threads still work the same way, mutexes and condition variables still work the same way, and so forth. Not only that, but the rising numbers of multicore CPU desktop computers means that correct thread synchronization is more important than ever. Faulty assumptions about memory visibility that happened to be true for single core machines are often demonstrably false for multicore and multiprocessor machines, so the dangers of deadlock, livelock and race conditions are ever more present.

Still the definitive reference

Though it's probably worth downloading the new POSIX standard, or checking the man pages for the new functions, Programming with POSIX Threads is still a good reference to the POSIX thread APIs, and multi-threaded programming in general. It sits well alongside Patterns for Parallel Programming — whereas Patterns for Parallel Programming is mainly about designing programs for concurrency, Programming with POSIX Threads is very much focused on getting the implementation details right.

Highly Recommended.

Buy this book

Programming with POSIX Threads
David Butenhof
Published by Addison-Wesley
ISBN 0-201-63392-2

Buy from Amazon.co.uk
Buy from Amazon.com

Posted by Anthony Williams
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Tags: reviews, threads, POSIX, Butenhof, books
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