pthread and concurrent programming under ubuntu

[balteo]

Hello,

I would like to know what is the best way to develop concurrent applications in C++ under linux. I don't know whether to go for the Boost library of directly code using the Pthread C API.

Can anyone please kindly give their advice?

Is Boost the standard wrapper around Pthreads?

Thanks in advance,

Julien.

[kfmfe04]

Yes, AFAIK, boost wraps Pthreads - don't know if I would call it a standard wrapper, though.

I have been using valgrind/drd/helgrind to check against race conditions, and I found too many false positives using boost, so I switched to direct pthreads, which is working great so far.

[balteo]

Thanks for your reply,
What do you mean by false positives? Can you please give examples of problems encountered?
Julien.

[kfmfe04]

drd (and almost any race detection program) will flag race conditions when there is none.

Essentially, when boost and libc use non-standard ways of maintaining threads, race detectors have a difficult time keeping track of what's going on. Just try some simple examples yourself.

Check here for some discussions:
http://old.nabble.com/-drd--Race-condition-in-boost-thread-library--td28786561.html
http://www.cplusplus.com/forum/general/28949/

Ultimately, for valgrind/drd/helgrind to be useful, you will need to look deeply at each race condition and determine if you have a true or a false positive. If you determine it is a false positive, you can ask valgrind to produce a few lines to filter out those types of runs in the future.

[balteo]

I see...
thanks,
J.