I've decided my next little learning project would be threads, and I have an idea for a simple project to try it. I decided to try the thread library from Boost but I'm stuck on installation (haven't used Boost before). Most of Boost is just headers but the thread library is on the list of the bits that must be built separately. And ... it don't say how. Anyone got any pointers? Do I just go to the root directory and "make configure" then "make install"? This is MinGW btw ...

Options you may find easier if you just need threads: Allegro 4.9 or pthreads.

I forgot about pthreads; I know I've heard that name before. I'll try those instead then. Thanks for reminding me.

I second pthreads for their simplicity of use.

Does pthreads allow you to lock threads to specific cores? (set process affinity etc.) I don't see anything about it in a brief Google session. I get the impression that this makes multithreading faster since there will be less code cache threshing.

Also, most GUI frameworks include threads support. So if you're using one of them, you can just stick with their own threading functions. In some cases they include some higher level functionality, so it's easier to get the job done (QT for example has QtConcurrent).

If you are under windows, you can download prebuilt boost binaries from Boost Pro.

Boost threads are excellent, by the way. Better than pthreads (because they are object-oriented).

then the right command is:

bjam --build-type=complete gcc stage

according to the docs...

Meh; I'm already using C#. I am in fact spending my evening trying to get DirectX swap chains working so my rendering doesn't suck. Bloody hell is it complicated ...

Anyway I'm rethinking Boost threads since pthreads isn't object oriented, and the code is messier than I'd like as a result. I'm looking into both.

Boost threads go a step beyond pthreads in many situations, thanks to object orientation and other nifty c++ tricks.

I got the VC 2009 SP1 DVD image, and installed C# just to test it a bit. It wasn't hard to get a "Hello World" program running, what was hard was trying to figure out where the executable was, there was a "setup.exe" that caused errors on another computer, but the rest of it was text files. Maybe this other computer lacked some .NET thing, but the whole thing reminds me of that maiden aunt that says "Oh! You don't want to do that! You want to do this other thing.

I'm not sure about 2009, but AFAIK it still works the same. Your C# program (provided you chose "Windows Forms Application" or "Console Application" - web applications work differently) is compiled into a .exe which resides in yoursolution/yourproject/bin/debug or yoursolution/yourproject/bin/release by default, depending on your configuration. For most applications, you don't need anything but the executable (and, obviously, a .NET runtime that fits the compiler version; for 2009, you need .NET 3.5 if I'm not mistaken). If you have an App.config, you'll need to distribute that, too; and if you reference other assemblies (class libraries) outside the .NET framework, you need to distribute the dlls too (they are all copied to the same folder as your executable by default).

You can also add a "deployment" project to create an installer which contains everything you need on the target machine, including .NET.

If I'm not mistaken the common build tool for boost is bjam and I seem to remember that this was available as an exe (at least for Windows). I also seem to have built the threads library (but I haven't used it), so it must be possible with bjam.