Modern C

Chapter 18. Threads

This chapter covers

• Inter-thread control
• Initializing and destroying threads
• Working with thread-local data
• Critical data and critical sections
• Communicating through condition variables

Threads are another variation of control flow that allow us to pursue several tasks concurrently. Here, a task is a part of the job that is to be executed by a program such that different tasks can be done with no or little interaction between each other.

Our main example for this will be a primitive game that we call B9 that is a variant of Conway’s game of life (see Gardner [1970]). It models a matrix of primitive “cells” that are born, live, and die according to very simple rules. We divide the game into four different tasks, each ...