Question

I have a code base that is using many instances of detached boost::thread as folllows

boost::thread th( boost::bind(&myFunc,var1, var2 ));

Can I simply do a search replace and start using std::thread?

Do I need to replace boost::bind with std::bind too or that is unnecessary?

( I found I could do search replace boost::shared_ptr with std::shared_ptr and boost::scoped_ptr with std::unique_ptr so far without any issues.

My platform is Visual Studio 11 on Windows 7.

Answer 1

Can I simply do a search replace and start using std::thread?

The current version of boost::thread has a few features that aren’t in std::thread:

• join with timeout
• thread attributes
• interruption
• yield() and sleep() (deprecated)

See the boost documentation, where they are labelled EXTENSION. If you’re not using any of those, then it should be a direct replacement.

As mentioned in the comments, older versions of boost::thread had a different behaviour on destruction. They would detach the thread if it was still joinable; std::thread and the current boost::thread call std::terminate instead.

Do I need to replace boost::bind with std::bind too or that is unnecessary?

That’s not necessary; thread can be given any callable type. It’s also not necessary to use bind at all, since it has a variadic constructor:

std::thread th(&myFunc, var1, var2);