I'm using boost 1.53 on windows 7. I have a main loop which runs some checks and when events are received, results in callbacks that add tasks onto a queue. I then pull a task off the queue, wish to start a thread (and only one thread) to handle the task, and continue to loop checking for certain events. And each time I go through the loop, I want to check to see if the current thread has completed before pulling off another task to process.
My problem is that I'm not sure how to write the thread in to do this and not join because I have to keep looping to check for certain events.
You can use timed_join, as in your example, but note that the thread might exit anytime. Instead of complicated management of tasks and threads, why would't you use asio::io_service? Just run it in 1 thread, and post your tasks to it. When io_service doesn't have any "active" work, its thread would be idle. //setup io_serivce before the loop asio::io_service io_service; // give it some "work", to prevent premature exit shared_ptrasio::io_service::work work(new asio::io_service::work(io_service)); boost::thread t(&asio::io_service::run, &io_service); t.detach(); //... // from within your loop, post tasks io_service.post(yourFunctor); // yourFunctor will be executed in the separate thread