C Threading Library

[S6k9GNh0]

Anyone know of any C cross-platform thread libraries?

[helios]

pthreads

[S6k9GNh0]

I was thinking pthreads is to Linux only. Little did I know after I did the research, pthreads is another specification adopted by many platforms except of course Microsoft Windows. Fortunately, someone took the time to implement the pthread API natively on Windows.

http://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32/

It looks a bit out of date but it should be okay... I hope....

[writetonsharma]

for windows you can use windows threads also.

[S6k9GNh0]

yeah, but when I have an application that is already implemented with the pthreads API, that's a lot of trouble.

Also trying Cygwin right now. Seems libgsm keeps giving me crap.

Anyone know anything truly bad about about using Cygwin?

[helios]

For one reason or another, I can never compile anything sufficiently complex with Cygwin. MSYS is even worse.

[S6k9GNh0]

Yeah, Cygwin is quite convenient but it does do some rather dumb things.

A great example is taking out a re-entrant function (gethostbyname_r) because gethostbyname is thread safe in there library. But now every person who implemented using gethostbyname_r has to setup a crappy macro to fix all of this.

MSys is by no means the same as Cygwin though. Cygwin attempts to implement a POSIX compliant API, thus allowing most Linux applications to compile on Win32 under certain circumstances. This is a great benefit though, even with the small kinks. If this didn't exist, I couldn't use BSD sockets or pthreads, especially since no one else implemented this in an individual library or API.

MinGW doesn't do this and simply gives a minimal GCC environment. It also provides it's own version of win32 gcc.

[kbw]

ACE provides a WIN32 pthreads implementation.

[Galik]

If you mean C++ then the boost library has cross platform thread support.

http://www.boost.org/

The thread library is described here:

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_40_0/doc/html/thread.html