The Global Engineer’s Notebook

There are not a lot of websites and resources for C++ news these days.  Occasionally, Dr. Dobb’s Journal has some interesting articles, such as the Concurrent Queue seiries. So far there are three articles in response to the original idea, and it looks like more are to follow.

Lock-Free Queues – original idea for a lock-free queue
Lock-Free Code: A False Sense of Security – Herb Sutter’s first in a series of articles on a concurrent queue implementation
Writing Lock-Free Code: A Corrected Queue – Herb Sutter’s second article in the series
Writing a Generalized Concurrent Queue – Herb Sutter’s third article in the series
Somewhat related, there are also some interesting articles on threading as well:

What’s New in Boost Threads by Anthony Williams
Managing Application Thread Use by Levent Akyil
The Trouble With Locks – an older article by Herb Sutter on locks

DevX is running an artcile titled Simpler Multithreading in C++0x by Andrew Williams.  It is a very good introduction the multithreading supported that is to be present in C++0x.

Anthony Williams, author of the Boost threads library, is writing a book on C++ threading based on the upcoming thread support to be added to C++0x.  I am definitely going to pick it up when it comes out on paper.  Hopefully by the time the book comes out, the compiler developers will have a robust implementation of the threading libraries.

After years of messing with PThreads and Win32 threads, Boost threads have really made my life easier.  Boost threads are simple and they sure help make your code a lot more readable.  The only problem with Boost is that you have to install it separately and that can require a lot of researching and trial-and-error on older hardware and non-standard architectures.  It will be nice to have threading built into the language standard like in Ada and Java.