Question

Does anyone has experience with the rather new std::async? We are currently implementing a parallel file parser, which reads a file chunk and passes this chunk to an async function.

Using Clang (v3.0) this way works really fine with the default std::async policies (implementation dependent). On a two core machine, it fires up to 4 threads what works really well.

But with GCC (v4.7), the file reading thread does not spawn any new threads, making the program in the end completely sequential.

Using std::launch::async, both versions are pretty much doing the same (what should be the case).

Does anyone know the status of the current of GCC’s c++11 threading capabilities? Or might this be an error in our implementation?

Short code:

while (readNewChunk()) {
    Chunk &chunk = fileReader_.getChunk(); //reading the file
    ChunkLoader *chunkLoader = new ChunkLoader();
    auto ftr = std::async(std::launch::async, &ChunkLoader::createDictionaries, chunkLoader);
    dictCreationFutures_.push_back(std::move(ftr));
}

Answer 1

The behavior is within spec, even if it’s not what you desire. If you don’t specify a launch policy, it is taken to be async|deferred, which means it is up to the implementation to decide which. GCC happens to always pick deferred if given a choice.