Johan 't Hart schrieb:
Thanks for your replies.
To me boost::condition looks very much like the old event variable, except that it works together with a mutex. I am now wondering why you should lock a mutex before waiting for the condition? Is there a rationale about this?
I recommend getting a book on pthreads (Posix Threads). E.g. "Programming with POSIX Threads" David. R. Butenhof. You will understand then why the sole combination of mutex and condition valiables will solve (almost) every MT need. I said almost because there is on some platforms (Win32) an inherent inability to cancel out of blocking IO calls. However the clever guys that ported pthreads to Win32 solved a lot of these problems. You might also look into my thread_alert submission which is in the boost file vault. It does address this later issue to some degree. Regards, Roland