Creating Native Windows Threads

A basic Windows application will start with a single thread. The function call to request that Windows create a child thread is CreateThread(). This call takes the parameters shown in Table 6.1.

Table 6.1. Parameters Passed to CreateThread()

Parameter Type	Comment
LPTHREADATTRIBUTES	The security attributes of the thread; a discussion of this is outside the scope of this text. However, passing zero will suffice for the purposes of creating child threads.
SIZE_T	The stack size for the thread. The default is for each thread to get 1MB of stack space. A thread created using a POSIX API would have its stack size provided by a separate attributes structure.
LPTHREAD_START_ROUTINE	The address of the function that the thread will execute.
LPVOID	The parameters that are to be passed to the thread.
DWORD	Whether the thread should be created in a suspended state. A suspended thread needs to be started by a call to the ResumeThread() function.
LPDWORD	A pointer to a variable where the thread ID can be written.