Modern C++ Programming Cookbook

Sending notifications between threads

Mutexes are synchronization primitives that can be used to protect access to shared data. However, the standard library provides a synchronization primitive called a condition variable that enables a thread to signal to others that a certain condition has occurred. The thread or the threads that are waiting on the condition variable are blocked until the condition variable is signaled or until a timeout or a spurious wakeup occurs. In this recipe, we will see how to use condition variables to send notifications between thread-producing data and thread-consuming data.