I’d like to start learning multithreading in C++. I’m learning it in Java as well. In Java, if I write a program which uses multithreading, it will work anywhere. However in C++, doesn’t multithreading rely on platform-specific API’s? If so, that would seem to get in the way of portability.
How can I do multithreading in C++ without causing portability issues? Is boost’s thread library a good solution?
As a sidenote – how is it even possible to implement multithreading as a library? Isn’t that something that has to be done by the compiler?
If you do not have a compiler that supports C++0x yet (available with visual studio c++ 2010 for example), use boost threads. (Unless you use a framework that already supports threading, which is not the case – you wouldn’t ask the question otherwise -). These boost threads became actually the standard in the brand new C++. Before that time C++ itself was thread unaware.
TBB Threading Building Blocks might also be interesting to you if you want to learn other aspects in parallel programming.
Regarding
Qt: if you only want threading support it is complete overkill. It has horribly slow round trip times from compiling to result. It is really well designed thought. But not an official standard like the C++0x threads from boost. Therefore I would not take it as a first choice.