Managing Threads with a Vector

Wednesday, 10 December 2008

One of the nice things about C++0x is the support for move semantics that comes from the new Rvalue Reference language feature. Since this is a language feature, it means that we can easily have types that are movable but not copyable without resorting to std::auto_ptr-like hackery. One such type is the new std::thread class. A thread of execution can only be associated with one std::thread object at a time, so std::thread is not copyable, but it is movable — this allows you to transfer ownership of a thread of execution between objects, and return std::thread objects from functions. The important point for today's blog post is that it allows you to store std::thread objects in containers.

Move-aware containers

The C++0x standard containers are required to be move-aware, and move objects rather than copy them when changing their position within the container. For existing copyable types that don't have a specific move constructor or move-assignment operator that takes an rvalue reference this amounts to the same thing — when a std::vector is resized, or an element is inserted in the middle, the elements will be copied to their new locations. The important difference is that you can now store types that only have a move-constructor and move-assignment operator in the standard containers because the objects are moved rather than copied.

This means that you can now write code like:

std::vector<std::thread> v;

v.push_back(std::thread(some_function));

and it all "just works". This is good news for managing multiple threads where the number of threads is not known until run-time — if you're tuning the number of threads to the number of processors, using std::thread::hardware_concurrency() for example. It also means that you can then use the std::vector<std::thread> with the standard library algorithms such as std::for_each:

void do_join(std::thread& t)
{
    t.join();
}

void join_all(std::vector<std::thread>& v)
{
    std::for_each(v.begin(),v.end(),do_join);
}

If you need an extra thread because one of your threads is blocked waiting for something, you can just use insert() or push_back() to add a new thread to the vector. Of course you can also just move threads into or out of the vector by indexing the elements directly:

std::vector<std::thread> v(std::thread::hardware_concurrency());

for(unsigned i=0;i<v.size();++i)
{
    v[i]=std::thread(do_work);
}

In fact, many of the examples in my book use std::vector<std::thread> for managing the threads, as it's the simplest way to do it.

Other containers work too

It's not just std::vector that's required to be move-aware — all the other standard containers are too. This means you can have a std::list<std::thread>, or a std::deque<std::thread>, or even a std::map<int,std::thread>. In fact, the whole C++0x standard library is designed to work with move-only types such as std::thread.

Try it out today

Wouldn't it be nice if you could try it out today, and get used to using containers of std::thread objects without having to wait for a C++0x compiler? Well, you can — the 0.6 beta of the just::thread C++0x Thread Library released last Friday provides a specialization of std::vector<std::thread> so that you can write code like in these examples and it will work with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. Sign up at the just::thread Support Forum to download it today.

Posted by Anthony Williams
[/ threading /] permanent link
Tags: threads, C++0x, vector, multithreading, concurrency
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