1.5. Summary

In this chapter, I covered what is meant by concurrency and multithreading and why you’d choose to use it (or not) in your applications. I also covered the history of multithreading in C++ from the complete lack of support in the 1998 standard, through various platform-specific extensions, to proper multithreading support in the new C++ Standard, C++11. This support is coming just in time to allow programmers to take advantage of the greater hardware concurrency becoming available with newer CPUs, as chip manufacturers choose to add more processing power in the form of multiple cores that allow more tasks to be executed concurrently, rather than increasing the execution speed of a single core.

I also showed how simple using the classes and functions from the C++ Standard Library can be, in the examples in section 1.4. In C++, using multiple threads isn’t complicated in and of itself; the complexity lies in designing the code so that it behaves as intended.