Question

I have the following Windows code that spawns two threads then waits until they have both completed:

hThreads[0] = _beginthread(&do_a, 0, p_args_a);
hThreads[1] = _beginthread(&do_b, 0, p_args_b);
WaitForMultipleObjects(2, hThreads, TRUE, INFINITE);

I am now porting the same code to use pthreads but am unsure how to do the equivalent of WaitForMultipleObjects:

pthread_create(&hThreads[0], 0, &do_a, p_args_a);
pthread_create(&hThreads[1], 0, &do_b, p_args_b);
???

Is there an equivalent way, using pthreads, to achieve the same functionality?

Answer 1

If you want to wait for all, as you’re doing here, you can simply call pthread_join() for each thread. It will accomplish the same thing.

pthread_create(&hThreads[0], 0, &do_a, p_args_a);
pthread_create(&hThreads[1], 0, &do_b, p_args_b);

pthread_join(hThreads[0], NULL);
pthread_join(hThreads[1], NULL);

You can get fancy and do this in a for loop if you’ve got more than a couple of threads.