C++ 11, Concurrency

I’ve been watching Bartosz Milewski’s C++ 11 Concurrency videos and they’re a pretty good way to get up to speed on the new threading support in the latest C++ standard. They start off nice and slowly, for people who haven’t been doing concurrency for years, and explain the various new features provided by the language. It’s good stuff.

I’ve been reading Anthony Williams’ C++ Concurrency In action which is a great way to understand the details of what you’ll see in the videos. It’s a good book and there’s lots of useful stuff in there even if you’ve been writing multi-threaded code for years. The chapters on designing thread-safe data structures, with locks and lock-free, were especially interesting. The lock-free chapter being just about scary enough to put most people off of rolling their own lock-free data structures, I hope.

To someone who’s been writing multi-threaded code for over 10 years this sudden interest in concurrency seems a little strange, but if you want to understand why it’s becoming more and more important then Herb Sutter’s Welcome to the Jungle video is worth watching. If you’re interested in C++11 in general then the excellent Channel 9 coverage of the Going Native conference is worth watching.

And finally, now that I’ve worked my way through all of that lot, I need to find some more good technical videos to watch whilst I’m working out. Does anyone have any suggestions?