Re: [Boost-users] question about threading library

Thanks for this information. I appreciate the effort you've put into this, and I have a lot of confidence in the library. But I feel it would be more useful to me and others if it were it to have a lot more tutorial type documentation and examples. Robert Ramey Anthony Williams wrote:

"Robert Ramey" writes:

...

I want to use the boost threading library in an application.

Looking through the documentation, I have a questions.

a) in the examples I find "boost::mutex::scoped_lock" but I don't find this in the documentation. It looks like this is called "lock_guard". What should I be doing here.

boost::mutex::scoped_lock is provided for backwards compatibility. It is a typedef for boost::unique_lockboost::mutex.

I suggest using lock_guard unless you need backwards compatibility with boost 1.34 or earlier, or need the flexibility provided by unique_lock.

...

b) Its not clear to me how unique_lock(Lockable l) is different than using lock_gard(..) or scoped_lock.

lock_guard is a lightweight wrapper that *always* owns the lock. It is not movable, and doesn't support try_lock, timed locks or unlock/release.

unique_lock is a more fully-featured lock owner. It supports the full Lockable interface (including try_lock and timed_lock), so you can pass it to boost::lock. Ownership can be transferred between unique_lock instances, and a given instance may or may not have an associated mutex, and may or may not own the lock on its mutex.

You can also use unique_lock with condition variables, which you can't do with lock_guard.

scoped_lock is just a typedef to unique_lock in most cases.

Anthony