What type of multithreading would be best to learn?

Question

I want to learn multi-threading in C++ but I'm not sure what type would be most useful. The ones I've seen tutorials on are:

• Windows native calls
• OpenMP
• Boost

(I'm sure that there are probably more.)

What is each one's key features and what are they best used for?

Note: I've already done some multi-threading in C# by manually creating the threads, and more complexity of the threading will just make it more fun. :)

Answer 1

I'd start with pthreads if you have more of a C background, or Boost Thread if you are accustomed to more idiomatic C++. Either is reasonably portable and widely used.

Answer 2

How about TBB? It is portable and has easy to use parallel template patterns, concurrent containers, task scheduler and scalable memory allocaturs. TBB will let you manage threads directly, but that is not necessary in most of the cases.

Personally I would stay away from platform specific threads, unless there an urgent need to do something, well, platform specific.

Boost threads is portable and easy to use, but does have neither parallel patterns nor concurrent containers. You would need to manager threads manually, which can get ugly pretty quickly.

PThreads isn't available on Windows and its C. You really want to do multi-threading in C++, not C. RAII mixes well with mutexes and scoped locks.

Another option is PPL in Visual C++ 2010. It is similar to TBB, but as you may guess available for Windows only.

OpenMP is easy to use, but not very flexible. Since you already learned C++, you should use something more serious, such as TBB or PPL. For some strange reason Visual C++ 2010 doesn't support OpenMP 3. Too bad.