Question

I’m trying to understand how threads works. I have some examples from the school. In this one I have to figure out why this piece of code doesn’t work properly. Its output is this:

Main: Creating thread 0
Main: Creating thread 1
Main: Creating thread 2
Main: Creating thread 3
Main: Creating thread 4
Main: Creating thread 5
Main: Creating thread 6
Main: Creating thread 7
Main: Creating thread 8
Thread 0: English: Hello World!
Thread 0: English: Hello World!
Thread 0: English: Hello World!
Thread 0: English: Hello World!
Thread 0: English: Hello World!
Thread 0: English: Hello World!
Thread 0: English: Hello World!
Thread 0: English: Hello World!
Thread 0: English: Hello World!

But every thread should say ‘Hello World’ in a different language. Here is my code. It works fine when the fourth parameter in function pthread_create is just (void *) t instead of the pointer. But I know that the right solution is with (void *) &t. Probably I’m dealing with some pointer problem but i just can’t see the way…

#include <pthread.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>

#define NUM_THREADS 8

char *messages[NUM_THREADS + 1] = 
{
   "English: Hello World!",
   "French: Bonjour, le monde!",
   "Spanish: Hola al mundo",
   "Klingon: Nuq neH!",
   "German: Guten Tag, Welt!",
   "Russian: Zdravstvytye, mir!",
   "Japan: Sekai e konnichiwa!",
   "Latin: Orbis, te saluto!",
   "Cesky: Ahoj svete!"
};


void * helloThread ( void * threadid )
{
   int *id_ptr, taskid;

   sleep(1);
   id_ptr = (int *) threadid;
   taskid = *id_ptr;
   printf("Thread %d: %s\n", taskid, messages[taskid]);
   return(NULL);
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
   pthread_t threads[NUM_THREADS];
   int rc, t;

   for(t=0;t<=NUM_THREADS;t++) {
      printf("Main: Creating thread %d\n", t);
      rc = pthread_create(&threads[t], NULL, helloThread, (void *) &t );
      if (rc) {
         printf("ERROR; return code from pthread_create() is %d\n", rc);
         return (EXIT_FAILURE);
      }
  }

   pthread_exit(NULL);
   return ( 0 );
}

Answer 1

You’re passing a pointer to your loop iterator t in main().

When the loop increases the value of the iterator … your running threads see whatever that is at the time. Since all your threads are going to wait for one second before doing anything and you’re exiting from main() without waiting for the threads to complete, the thing you’re pointing at is no longer valid and anything you see will be undefined behavior.