Delayed start of a boost::thread

A nuisance of boost::thread is that as we create the instance, the new thread starts.

On antonym.org there is an interesting post on boost::thread creation that ends suggesting the creation of a wrapper class to solve this issue.

We use the fact that a boost::thread could be created without passing anything to the constructor, and in this case the object would be in a not-a-thread status. We will explicitly run the thread calling a start() method in our wrapper class, that creates a new boost::thread and assigns it to the member one.

Here is an example:

#include <iostream>
#include "boost\thread\thread.hpp"

using std::cout;
using std::endl;

namespace
{
    class ThreadSomething
    {
    private:
        boost::thread t_;
        int sec_;

        void doSomething(int sec)
        {
            cout << boost::this_thread::get_id() << ": doing something" << endl;
            boost::this_thread::sleep(boost::posix_time::seconds(sec));
        }

    public:
        ThreadSomething(int sec) : sec_(sec) {}

        void start()
        {
            t_ = boost::thread(&ThreadSomething::doSomething, this, sec_);
        }

        void join()
        {
            t_.join();
        }
    };
}

void t06()
{
    cout << boost::this_thread::get_id() << ": creating a new thread"  << endl;
    ThreadSomething ts(2);

    cout << boost::this_thread::get_id() << ": starting a new thread"  << endl;
    ts.start();

    cout << boost::this_thread::get_id() << ": joining"  << endl;
    ts.join();
    cout << boost::this_thread::get_id() << ": done"  << endl;
}