This is the fourth of a series of blog posts introducing the new C++0x thread library. The first three parts covered starting threads in C++0x with simple functions, starting threads with function objects and additional arguments, and starting threads with member functions and reference arguments.

If you've read the previous parts of the series then you should be comfortable with starting threads to perform tasks "in the background", and waiting for them to finish. You can accomplish a lot of useful work like this, passing in the data to be accessed as parameters to the thread function, and then retrieving the result when the thread has completed. However, this won't do if you need to communicate between the threads whilst they are running — accessing shared memory concurrently from multiple threads causes undefined behaviour if either thread modifies the data. What you need here is some way of ensuring that the accesses are mutually exlusive, so only one thread can access the shared data at a time.

Mutual Exclusion with std::mutex

Mutexes are conceptually simple. A mutex is either "locked" or "unlocked", and threads try and lock the mutex when they wish to access some protected data. If the mutex is already locked then any other threads that try and lock the mutex will have to wait. Once the thread is done with the protected data it unlocks the mutex, and another thread can lock the mutex. If you make sure that threads always lock a particular mutex before accessing a particular piece of shared data then other threads are excluded from accessing the data until as long as another thread has locked the mutex. This prevents concurrent access from multiple threads, and avoids the undefined behaviour of data races. The simplest mutex provided by C++0x is std::mutex .

Now, whilst std::mutex has member functions for explicitly locking and unlocking, by far the most common use case in C++ is where the mutex needs to be locked for a specific region of code. This is where the std::lock_guard<> template comes in handy by providing for exactly this scenario. The constructor locks the mutex, and the destructor unlocks the mutex, so to lock a mutex for the duration of a block of code, just construct a std::lock_guard<> object as a local variable at the start of the block. For example, to protect a shared counter you can use std::lock_guard<> to ensure that the mutex is locked for either an increment or a query operation, as in the following example:

std::mutex m; unsigned counter=0; unsigned increment() { std::lock_guard<std::mutex> lk(m); return ++counter; } unsigned query() { std::lock_guard<std::mutex> lk(m); return counter; }

This ensures that access to counter is serialized — if more than one thread calls query() concurrently then all but one will block until the first has exited the function, and the remaining threads will then have to take turns. Likewise, if more than one thread calls increment() concurrently then all but one will block. Since both functions lock the same mutex, if one thread calls query() and another calls increment() at the same time then one or other will have to block. This mutual exclusion is the whole point of a mutex.

Exception Safety and Mutexes

Using std::lock_guard<> to lock the mutex has additional benefits over manually locking and unlocking when it comes to exception safety. With manual locking, you have to ensure that the mutex is unlocked correctly on every exit path from the region where you need the mutex locked, including when the region exits due to an exception. Suppose for a moment that instead of protecting access to a simple integer counter we were protecting access to a std::string , and appending parts on the end. Appending to a string might have to allocate memory, and thus might throw an exception if the memory cannot be allocated. With std::lock_guard<> this still isn't a problem — if an exception is thrown, the mutex is still unlocked. To get the same behaviour with manual locking we have to use a catch block, as shown below:

std::mutex m; std::string s; void append_with_lock_guard(std::string const& extra) { std::lock_guard<std::mutex> lk(m); s+=extra; } void append_with_manual_lock(std::string const& extra) { m.lock(); try { s+=extra; m.unlock(); } catch(...) { m.unlock(); throw; } }

If you had to do this for every function which might throw an exception it would quickly get unwieldy. Of course, you still need to ensure that the code is exception-safe in general — it's no use automatically unlocking the mutex if the protected data is left in a state of disarray.

Next time

Next time we'll take a look at the std::unique_lock<> template, which provides more options than std::lock_guard<> .

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Try it out

If you're using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or g++ 4.3 or 4.4 on Ubuntu Linux you can try out the examples from this series using our just::thread implementation of the new C++0x thread library. Get your copy today.

Here are the posts in this series so far:

Posted by Anthony Williams

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Tags: concurrency, multithreading, C++0x, thread

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