Subj : Re: Thoughts about threads in C++
To   : comp.programming.threads
From : Arash Partow
Date : Mon May 30 2005 12:02 am

Hi,

It was only intended to be a wrapper nothing else, nothing more. Some
people might find the simple light-weight approach useful. And as you
mentioned for you it might have little value.

As far as the extern C issue goes, why on earth would I want to be
extern C'ing a C++ wrapper of an API which is already available in C?
why wouldn't the person just use the standard pthread API in the first
place?

The only use for this API is in the context of simple C++ threading.

As for locking etc, I have to disagree with you. What C++ is about is
really left to the programmer. If *they* wanted to they could have the
made the language more restrictive like java and have something like
the synchronized syntax. But its not like that, C++ lets you do pretty
much whatever you can get away with, and if you're happy with that, and
if that gets the job done, then that should be enough. Bringing up the
example of why the "finally" keyword doesn't exist in C++ just shows
that what you think about this issue and what i think are two different
things.

As stated before this is a simple wrapper, no cool or esoteric
patterns here, just simple wrapping of a C API into a C++ class.

Also the derived thread class method/pattern (whatever), is pretty
standard way of threading a piece of code in OO manner. Its popular,
its simple to implement and understand, and has a very low over-head.

Btw I noticed in your messaging example, you templated the
ListenersCollection
and Messaging classes with Mutex policies. Though in your example code
you pass NoSynchronization, I'm assuming people can implement their own
mutexing policies where by you invoke their implementations of lock and
unlock?

Wouldn't that be a form of technical hypocrisy or technopocrisy? ;)




Regards


Arash Partow

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