Example
Thread synchronization can be accomplished using mutexes, among other synchronization primitives. There are several mutex types provided by the standard library, but the simplest is std::mutex. To lock a mutex, you construct a lock on it. The simplest lock type is std::lock_guard:
std::mutex m;
void worker() {
std::lock_guard<std::mutex> guard(m); // Acquires a lock on the mutex
// Synchronized code here
} // the mutex is automatically released when guard goes out of scope
With std::lock_guard the mutex is locked for the whole lifetime of the lock object. In cases where you need to manually control the regions for locking, use std::unique_lock instead:
std::mutex m;
void worker() {
// by default, constructing a unique_lock from a mutex will lock the mutex
// by passing the std::defer_lock as a second argument, we
// can construct the guard in an unlocked state instead and
// manually lock later.
std::unique_lock<std::mutex> guard(m, std::defer_lock);
// the mutex is not locked yet!
guard.lock();
// critical section
guard.unlock();
// mutex is again released
}
More Thread synchronization structures
