Appendix B. Brief comparison of concurrency libraries

Concurrency and multithreading support in programming languages and libraries aren’t something new, even though standardized support in C++ is new. For example, Java has had multithreading support since it was first released, platforms that conform to the POSIX standard provide a C interface for multithreading, and Erlang provides support for message-passing concurrency. There are even C++ class libraries such as Boost that wrap the underlying programming interface for multithreading used on any given platform (whether it’s the POSIX C interface or something else) to provide a portable interface across the supported platforms.

For those who are already experienced in writing multithreaded applications and would like to use that experience to write code using the new C++ multithreading facilities, this appendix provides a comparison between the facilities available in Java, POSIX C, C++ with the Boost Thread Library, and C++11, along with cross-references to the relevant chapters of this book.