Question

I’m trying to implement my own IRC client as a personal proejct and I realized I needed a way to read and write from the socket at the same time. I realized I could have a reading thread which reads from the socket in the background and puts data in a queue and I could have another thread which writes data from a queue to the socket. However I have no idea on how to start with multithreaded programing or how to do it with c++. Where do I go from here?

Answer 1

For C++ threads, boost::thread (which is the basis for the upcoming std::thread) is the best way to go. That said, while threads might be the correct solution for your particular case, I just wanted to throw it out there that select and non-blocking sockets are a common approach to interleaving the reading/writing and writing of multiple sockets without the need for threads. The boost::asio library wraps the functionality of select and non-blocking sockets in a cross-platform, C++ manner.