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Multithreading is not as hard as it sounds

2010 June 7
tags: , ,
by Tedb0t

I’ve been finally forced to really learn about multithreading, and I’ve got some basic concepts down.  I sifted through a lot of articles and tutorials and I think this one is the best.  Here’s the scoop:

Threads do the actual execution in a process, and they can all access the same region of memory.  If you’ve got multiple threads, you don’t want one to try to read from a block of memory while another thread is in the middle of writing to it, so you can use something called a mutex (meaning “mutual exclusion”) object to control this.  A mutex gives your program a way of saying “only this thread is allowed to work until I say so,” so you can read or write the entire block of memory safely.  It’s as simple as that!  Here’s a Windows C++ example and a pseudocode example:

var theData
var myMutex = CreateMutex()

waitForMutex(myMutex)
writeTheData(theData)
releaseMutex(myMutex)

Seriously, that’s really all there is to it.  At first I thought you had to specify which thread you want to do the work but I was thinking of it backwards; mutexes say “whichever thread is going now, don’t stop it until I say so.”  Bing!

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