Peter Danford wrote:
By introducing the tss into the thread implementation mentioned below, are we gaining functionality so useful it outweighs the benefit realized by having a static option available?
This is a question we better not get into. ;-) A brief history. At first, Boost.Threads supported static linking. It used a helper DLL (threadmon.dll) to implement TSS cleanup on Windows. At that time I suggested to Bill Kempf that (a) it might be useful to isolate the mechanism in a dedicated "at_thread_exit" function exported by threadmon.dll, thereby allowing users to implement their own cleanup (or to omit it entirely if they know that their application does not continually create and destroy threads) and (b) that if Boost.Threads is implemented itself as a DLL (as pthreads-win32 is) there would be no need for a separate threadmon.dll. Now obviously (b) without (a) - the current status quo - is somewhat problematic for people that don't like DLLs or the DLL runtime (of which I am one). So I think that we ought to implement (a) as well; statically linking to Boost.Threads would then result in an unresolved reference to at_thread_exit, expecting a suitable definition from the user (or from at_thread_exit.dll, which we'd also supply). The DLL version of Boost.Threads should, of course, continue to work out of the box, with no user intervention required. It is very unfortunate that Bill is no longer active, or even reachable for comment. I wonder what happened to him.