Is c++11 thread platform independent?

Question

I searched for lots of questions and answers, but I really couldn't figure out this issue. Yesterday I have tried C++11 thread on Windows in a Visual C++ project and it works fine.

Does that mean we can use C++11 threads on every platform that has a compiler with C++11 support? Are there any reasons not to use this thread instead of pthread or Windows thread (depending on the platform)?

Answer 1

The C++ 11 thread library still uses threads from the OS and relies on them but it is abstracted in a good way so you will experience almost no differences. The behavior is different only in the detail and you will almost not notice them (only on edge cases and/or on failure). There might be still some platforms out there which don't support everything from std::thread (even in 2015, e.g. on some specific / exotic mobile platforms).

From the C++ Standard:

30 Thread support library

Some functions described in this Clause are specified to throw exceptions of type system_error (19.5.6). Such exceptions shall be thrown if any of the function’s error conditions is detected or a call to an operating system or other underlying API results in an error that prevents the library function from meeting its specifications. Failure to allocate storage shall be reported as described in 17.6.5.12.