CppCon 2021

You have spent your hard earned money on a multi-core machine. But what does that mean for you as a programmer or for the consumers of your software who also spent their hard earned money on a multi-core machine? Well the deal is, you only get an increase in performance, if you know how to take advantage of your hardware. Perhaps you have also heard something about the free lunch being over for programmers?

In this talk we provide a gentle introduction to concurrency with the modern C++ std::thread library. We will introduce topics with pragmatic code examples introducing the ideas of threads and locks, and showing how these programming primitives enable concurrency. In addition, we will show the common pitfalls to be aware of with concurrency: data races, starvation, and deadlock (the most extreme form of starvation!). But don’t worry--I will show you how to fix these concurrency bugs!

The session will wrap up with discussion and examples of other concurrency primitives and how to use them to write concurrent programs for common patterns(different types of locks, conditional variables, promises/futures). Attendees will leave this session being able to use threads, locks, and start thinking about architecting multithreaded software. All materials and code samples will also be posted online.