Creating a POSIX thread

If you are working in plain C, or even if you are working in C++ and your compiler does not support yet the friendly std::thread class (and for some obscure reason you could not use boost::thread) you should rely on your platform dependent thread API.

If you are developing for some UNIX/Linux system, there are good chances you have at hand a POSIX compliant thread API.

Here we are going to see how to create a new thread using this API.

We should pass to the new thread a pointer to the function we want to run. That function should accept in input a pointer to void and return another pointer to void. Say that we expect the caller passing as parameter a C-string, and we want jut to output it to standard output. We could write something like this:

void* task(void* arg)
{
    printf("%s\n", (const char*)arg);
    return NULL;
}

This code is painfully sensitive, we should trust the caller is actually passing what we are expecting, since we have no way to let the compiler ensure that the parameter is really a C-string.

Before calling the pthread API function to create a new thread, we need at least a variable to store the id for the newly created thread, and possibly another variable to store the integer returned from the function call, that is an error code set to zero in case success.

The resulting code should look something like this:

pthread_t thread; // 1
int res = pthread_create(&thread, NULL, task, (void*)"hello"); // 2
if(res != 0) // 3
    printf("Can't create a thread: %d\n", res);

1. The posix thread creator function expects an object of type pthread_t for storing the id of the created thread.
2. Here is how we call pthread_create(). First parameter is a pointer to a pthread_t object - this is an output parameter; second one is a pointer to the attributes we want to set for the new thread, for the moment let's assume we'll go with the default ones, and just pass a NULL to let the posix thread library know that we don't want to set anything fancy; third one is a pointer to the function the thread should run; and lastly we have the parameter we want to pass to that function.
3. A failure is signaled by returning a non-zero value. We can't actually doing much here, just giving a warning to the user.