Introduction

The cppthread started based on the functionality offered by the snap_thread.cpp/.h from the libsnapwebsites.

It includes support for communication between threads, a thread pool, mutexes, etc.

Features

The basic library supports a thread controller and a runner. This allows for a lot of safety that threads do not otherwise offer in C++ (i.e. it is too late to try to destroy a thread once you are in the destructor because most if not all of its virtual functions are going to be wrong by then.)

The library also offers thread pools, guards/mutex, and inter-thread communication with a FIFO implementation.

Here are the various objects found in the library:

• Thread Controller (thread)
• Runner, the actual thread (runner)
• Pool workers (pool, worker)
• Guard variables (mutex, guard)
• Control thread lifetime (life)
• Inter thread communication (fifo)
• Logging capability (log)
• Thread Specific Exceptions (cppthread_exception)
• Listing processes/threads
• Loading of plugins (.so files, plugins)
• Signals between plugins (signal)

Safety

As mentioned above, many processes crash because of thread mishandling. The main issue is to find yourself in the thread destructor when the thread is still running. This is not likely to work as expected. If your class has virtual functions, by the time the thread destructor is hit, your virtual functions were removed from that object and thus your functions won't get called. The default ones are called instead. So the results are likely wrong (unless you implement your own thread class and it does it all for you or you use callbacks instead of virtual functions).

This library tries to help you with that. You first want the thread objects to be destroyed, those will force a stop() on the runner and then you can safely destroy the runner. This means you want to create classes where you first define a runner implementation and then the corresponding thread:

class my_class
{
     ...

private:
     my_runner::pointer_t           f_runner;
     cppthread::thread::pointer_t   f_thread;
};

Such a class destructor first calls the f_thread destructor which calls the thread::stop() function. That function asks the corresponding runner (and we assume this is f_runner) to exit as soon as possible (the continue_running() function now returns false). Once the runner returned, the thread::stop() function detects that because of the join that it does against the runner. It returns after the join completed which means the runner is completely done (the actual corresponding kernel task did quit).

Once the thread::stop() returns, it is 100% safe to destroy the f_runner object since the thread is not running anymore.

So beside the order in which you declare the thread and runner, the only other rule is to test the continue_running() flag if your thread is of the kind "running forever" and you have a very safe environment.

WARNING: If you want to create a class which derives from cppthread, it can't own the runner. So a class like this is ill formed:

class my_super_thread
    : cppthread::thread
{
...
private:
    cppthread::runner::pointer_t   f_my_runner;
};

Your class is going to call the destructor of the runner before the one from the thread. So again, that would destroy an object still in use (while the thread is still running). This is exactly why we do not have the runner defined in our cppthread::thread class.

Inter-thread Messages

To share data between threads, you must have guards.

Whenever possible, when the thread is fed messages (rather than flags changing in various variables), it is best to use the provided cppthread::fifo object. This is a very fast queue which allows you to safely send and receive messages (i.e. payloads). The FIFO automatically uses a guard to add new messages and to remove existing messages. In other words, the messages you get are 100% ready for you to access as you wish.

The name "FIFO" is somewhat misleading when using the thread pool system and now that this class supports a priority system which allows for processing messages early. The priority actually uses dependencies. So message A can be marked as necessary to be able to process message B. In that case, B will be sitting in the FIFO until the processing of A is complete. When no such dependency exists, both messages can be processed in parallel or at least in any order.

For threads that do not just receive/send messages, you must make sure to use the cppthread::guard object with a cppthread::mutex to create a barrier. Although a boolean flag may work as is without the need for a mutex. However, with all the various CPU caches, it is very likely that, once in while, a change to such a flag will not be visible for a while.

Thread Pools

The library supports thread pools. A pool is an array of threads which are expected to be used to execute work as it comes in. The next workload gets taken on by the next available thread from that pool.

Our implementation specifically makes use of the cppthread::fifo which indicates the next workload. Any one thread may wake up whenever a new workload appears in the FIFO.

If you have more complex needs than a simple FIFO, then you would have to implement your own thread pool. You can, of course, draw from our implementation.

WARNING: Keep in mind that in this case each thread is just a shell to run some task against a workload. The only dynamic variables you can use are the ones found in the workload. The worker thread can only defined static parameters (i.e. parameters you setup on startup and never change later). This is because you can't know which thread is going to run next and no order is guaranteed.

Thread Lifetime

We have a cppthread::life object which can be used to stop a thread at the time the life object is deleted. This can be useful because the cppthread::~thread() function calls stop(), but it ignores all the exceptions (this is because those exceptions would otherwise occur in a destructor).

So this gives your software the ability to receive the cppthread::runner exceptions as otherwise expected by this implementation.

Exceptions

The crux of this library implementation, is the runner::run() function which is where you want to have your code running in a separate thread. The function is called in such a way that if an exception occurs, it gets saved in the thread object and re-thrown in the owner of the thread when joining with it (just after joining, that is).

Now there are issues with that scheme since at times you want to start a thread for the entire duration of your application and thus you're not going to be actively waiting on it to join. That means the exception won't get propagated properly. For such cases, we at least have logs and the runner::leave() function which can be used to detect those rogue exceptions. You can, of course, have your own try/catch in your implementation of the runner::run() function. But if those exceptions are not expected and you have many threads, using the runner::leave() function is going to be a lot less work for you.

Logs

The library makes use of a very basic log mechanism which sends log messages to std::cerr unless you define your own callback to capture those messages (see cppthread::set_log_callback()).

If you are using the snaplogger library along the cppthread library, then those logs are automatically going to be passed to the snaplogger library (i.e. that library automatically calls the set_log_callback() function for you).

Internally, the cppthread library takes care of locking the logger as required so the logs from multiple threads do not get mangled. If any error occurs while handling the mutexes, locking, unlocking, then an error is printed in std::cerr and std::terminate() gets called.

License

The project is covered by the GPL 2.0 license.

Bugs

Submit bug reports and patches on github.

This file is part of the snapcpp project.

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