1 yr. ago • 84%

Was my decision to use C threads unwise?

Without realizing what I was getting myself into, I wrote some code using C11's threads.h (EDIT: every time I use the angle brackets < and > they just get eaten, even in the code snippet block.) I'm realizing after the fact that this is basically only supported on Linux (gcc/clang). This is my target platform, but I guess if I could cross compile to Windows or macOS that would be nice, too.

C's threads nominally appear to be a great feature. Finally, a standardized and straightforward interface to threads that would be cross-platform compatible. The reality appears to be anything but.

So is it worth just replacing that code with pthreads? Is there some near-term development on C threads that might make this worthwhile to use? I'm kind of surprised it hasn't really caught on some 12 years after the standard was introduced.

6 comments

pthreads is fine and widely supported. I would probably recommend that interface for now. Maybe after 5 years or so when all of the LTS systems support the new standard that will be the better option, but all major OSes are POSIX compatible so no need for a new standard anyways.

Also if you want to take advantage of any OS-specific extensions they are probably supported by pthreads, but the new C threads API will probably lag.

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c11 threads seem to be supported by msvc https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/c11-threads-in-visual-studio-2022-version-17-8-preview-2/

Probably gcc supports it on both mac and MS

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As far as I know, C's threads.h implementation (or std::thread for C++) is based on POSIX threads.

If you're using CMake or a similar build system that can define macros when building from Windows, then one option you have is to simply create an interface of sorts.
Something like:

// angle brackes work for this codeblock? idk #ifdef PLATFORM_WIN32 // The syntax MSVC wants (which I'm not familiar with) #include "fuckmissingbracketsidontrememberwhatiwrotehere" thread_t win32_create_thread( /* ... */ ) { /* ... */ } #else // The syntax sensible compilers want (which I'm also unfamiliar with because I forgor U+1F480) #include "fuckmissingbracketsidontrememberwhatiwrotehere" int thrd_create( /* ... */ ) { /* ... */ } #endif

It may be a bit tedious, but I don't know if there is some widely known C equivalent to the Boost library, at least for threads.
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- Yeah. I think I'll end up having to do platform-specific ifdefs with either pthreads or threads.h, so I guess I may as well use the much better established pthreads and get macOS support by default. In fact, I just now learned that even glibc didn't support C11 threads until 2018, according to this https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=14092#c10
  
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  I swear they did in the preview
  
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- Sadly. angle brackes do not work for that codeblock.
  
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  I swear they did in the preview
  
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