Question

Is there a template that can be used to create threads when we program in OO language ?

How to go about designing a threading package for an OO language?

Answer 1

Support

C++0x will support threads in the standard library.

As of now, each platform has its own way of implementing threads (Windows, POSIX) but you can use something such as boost::thread to not have to worry about platform-specific stuff.

In Java, there is a Thread class.

Methods

In general, to put a class into another thread, you will create a thread while passing that class into the thread. Then the thread will call a function in that class. Here is some pseudo-C++-code:

main() {     Object myObject;      thread = CreateThread(threadFunction, myObject);      thread.join(); // wait for thread }  threadFunction(Object theObject) {     theObject.doSomething(); } 

This is all simplified by the use of boost (or C++0x threads) in C++, and the Thread class in Java handles this for you.

Related Information

A large problem in threaded applications is synchronization of threads. This includes problems like race conditions and deadlocks, to name a couple.

Methods/object exist to help these problems, such as a mutex. A mutex can be locked by one thread, and any other threads that try to lock the mutex will be blocked until the original thread releases the mutex.

A semaphore is a generalized mutex.

There are other useful concepts as outlined in Eric’s post.