Are there monitors in C?

Question

I am reading synchronization chapter in Operating system and am reading the topic "Monitors". I understand that monitors are high level language constructs. This makes me wonder if C provides something like monitor? Perhaps the library containing posix threads implementation should provide the monitor construct as well. Also, threads in C are not part of stl, right?

if yes, which header file/library contains it, a most elementary test program to use monitors and how the library implements monitors.

The book says a monitor type is an ADT - abstract data types. I wonder, does a C structure simulate a monitor data type?

Thanks,

Answer 1

• C has no notion of thread and doesn't provide monitors as syntactic structure.

• the POSIX thread library is just a library. And C abstraction facilities are not powerful enough to allow monitors to be provided as library element. POSIX gives the primitive needed to build monitors.

• STL is a C++ term (and not even a good one as it means different things for different people).

• to implement a monitor in C, you'd need a structure whose content you keep private and has at least a mutex, and a set of functions operating on the struct which start by taking the mutex.

Answer 2

C doesn't even have support for threads, that's implementation specific. You'll need to use a library for your monitor.