After overcoming my initial problems with compiling I have another question. I like very much the thread_group concept. My idea is to create different groups running different type of tasks. E.g. one group deals with user request tasks and another deal with responses from a mainframe etc. In addition, I think it would be good to be able to maximize the number of threads running concurrently in a single group. In this way one could tune the processes regarding to the number of CPUs and so that not one single group gets more CPU usage than others etc. I guess I'm not the first one to think about these things. Does anyone have any ideas about these type of task groups? Although it doesn't nearly contain what I want to do, I got the following test work nicely. #include <boost/thread/thread.hpp> #include <boost/thread/xtime.hpp> #include <iostream> #include <windows.h> template<class T> class thread_task { public: thread_task(T* obj) : m_obj(obj) { assert(m_obj != 0); } virtual ~thread_task() { } void operator() () { m_obj->setup(); m_obj->run(); m_obj->cleanup(); delete m_obj; } private: T* m_obj; }; class my_task { public: my_task() {} void setup() { std::cout << "setup " << GetCurrentThreadId() << std::endl; } void run() { std::cout << "Start sleeping in thread " << GetCurrentThreadId() << std::endl; boost::xtime xt; boost::xtime_get(&xt, boost::TIME_UTC); xt.sec += 1; boost::thread::sleep(xt); std::cout << "Woke up " << GetCurrentThreadId() << std::endl; } void cleanup() { std::cout << "cleanup " << GetCurrentThreadId() << std::endl; } }; int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { boost::thread_group threads; int i; for (i = 0; i < 10; ++i) { my_task* aTask = new my_task(); thread_task<my_task> new_task(aTask); threads.create_thread(new_task); } threads.join_all(); return 0; } By the way, is there an operation in boost::thread to get the current thread id?