I have a codebase that makes extensive use of pthread.h. On a windows visual studio project, this obviously doesn't work since pthreads is a unix utility.
I know there exists pthread-win32 or something of the sort, but is there a way to have a codebase use this, without replacing all of the pthread code?
edit: I'd prefer to not have to go through and replace all the pthread calls. This is my question
Try http://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32/. While I've never used that particular library, I've had luck using some windows ports/abstraction layers of POSIX APIs.
I would recommend boost as a library that contains a platform-independent thread abstraction. I don't think you'll find any attempt to call the pthread functions themselves to be satisfying. It's also not very hard to map pthread to Win32 for yourself.
If the code is very heavily *nix-based, you'll probably have the best luck compiling it with Cygwin+GCC. If pthreads is the only *nix dependency and you'd like to avoid the Cygwin dependency, then you should go with Pthreads-win32.
Related
I'm new to c++ compiling, tooling, llvm and such. I'm exploring ways of compiling some c++ apps for the browser. I'm not looking for solutions that just run the c++ app. For those situation emscripten seems to be just right. I'm looking for ways to build a hybrid app that has a lot of touch-points between the javascript part and the c++ part.
I had success compiling and running some c/c++ apps using the wasi-sdk provided clang and llvm. But the llvm provided by wasi-sdk does not support threads.
The wasi-sdk offers a set of stdlib that respect the wasi specification. This specification does not support multi-threading. Is there a way to add the pthreads from other stdlib implementations and implement the javascript glue code by hand (maybe seeking inspiration from emscripten). If yes, what would be the steps? LLVM seems to be compiled without threads support in wasi-sdk, so simply adding additional headers that define pthreads might not work.
Wasi (and wasi-sdk and wasi-libc) doesn't currently support threads. There is an effort underway to add support here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-threads
There have been several recent patches to wasi-libc: e.g. https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-libc/pull/325.
Let's put like this: We are going to create a library that needs to be cross platform and we choose GCC as compiler, it works awesomely on Linux and we need to compile it on Windows and we have the MinGW to do the work.
MinGW tries to implement a native way to compile C++ on Windows but it doesn't support some features like mutex and threads.
We have the MinGW-W64 that is a fork of MinGW that supports those features and I was wondering, which one to use? Knowing that GCC is one of the most used C++ compilers. Or it's better to use the MSVC (VC++) on Windows and GCC on Linux and use CMake to handle with the independent compiler?
Thanks in advance.
Personally, I prefer a MinGW based solution that cross compiles on Linux, because there are lots of platform independent libraries that are nearly impossible (or a huge PITA) to build on Windows. (For example, those that use ./configure scripts to setup their build environment.) But cross compiling all those libraries and their dependencies is also annoying even on Linux, if you have to ./configure and make each of them yourself. That's where MXE comes in.
From the comments, you seem to worry about dependencies. They are costly in terms of build environment setup when cross compiling, if you have to cross compile each library individually. But there is MXE. It builds a cross compiler and a large selection of platform independent libraries (like boost, QT, and lots of less notable libraries). With MXE, boost becomes a lot more attractive as a solution. I've used MXE to build a project that depends on Qt, boost, and libexiv2 with nearly no trouble.
Boost threads with MXE
To do this, first install mxe:
git clone -b master https://github.com/mxe/mxe.git
Then build the packages you want (gcc and boost):
make gcc boost
C++11 threads with MXE
If you would still prefer C++11 threads, then that too is possible with MXE, but it requires a two stage compilation of gcc.
First, checkout the master (development) branch of mxe (this is the normal way to install it):
git clone -b master https://github.com/mxe/mxe.git
Then build gcc and winpthreads without modification:
make gcc winpthreads
Now, edit mxe/src/gcc.mk. Find the line that starts with $(PKG)_DEPS := and add winpthreads to the end of the line. And find --enable-threads=win32 and replace it with --enable-threads=posix.
Now, recompile gcc and enjoy your C++11 threads.
make gcc
Note: You have to do this because the default configuration supports Win32 threads using the WINAPI instead of posix pthreads. But GCC's libstdc++, the library that implements std::thread and std::mutex, doesn't have code to use WINAPI threads, so they add a preprocessor block that strips std::thread and std::mutex from the library when Win32 threads are enabled. By using --enable-threads=posix and the winpthreads library, instead of having GCC try to interface with Win32 in it's libraries, which it doesn't fully support, we let the winpthreads act as glue code that presents a normal pthreads interface for GCC to use and uses the WINAPI functions to implement the pthreads library.
Final note
You can speed these compilations up by adding -jm and JOBS=n to the make command. -jm, where m is a number that means to build m packages concurrently. JOBS=n, where n is a number that means to use n processes building each package. So, in effect, they multiply, so only pick m and n so that m*n is at most not much more than the number of processor cores you have. E.g. if you have 8 cores, then m=3, n=4 would be about right.
Citations
http://blog.worldofcoding.com/2014_05_01_archive.html#windows
If you want portability, Use standard ways - <thread> library of C++11.
If you can't use C++11, pthread can be solution, although VC++ could not compile it.
Do you want not to use both of these? Then, just write your abstract layer of threading. For example, you can write class Thread, like this.
class Thread
{
public:
explicit Thread(int (*pf)(void *arg));
void run(void *arg);
int join();
void detach();
...
Then, write implementation of each platform you want to support. For example,
+src
|---thread.h
|--+win
|--|---thread.cpp
|--+linux
|--|---thread.cpp
After that, configure you build script to compile win/thread.cpp on windows, and linux/thread.cpp on linux.
You should definitely use Boost. It's really great and does all things.
Seriously, if you don't want to use some synchronization primitives that Boost.Thread doesn't support (such as std::async) take a look on the Boost library. Of course it's an extra dependency, but if you aren't scared of this, you will enjoy all advantages of Boost such as cross-compiling.
Learn about differences between Boost.Thread and the C++11 threads here.
I think this is a fairly generic list of considerations when you need to choose multi-platform tools or sets of tools, for a lot of these you probably already have an answer;
Tool support, who and how are you going to get support from if something doesn't work; how strong is the community and the vendor?
Native target support, how well does the tool understand the target platform?
Optimization potential?
Library support (now and in the intermediate future)?
Platform SDK support, if needed?
Build tools (although not directly asked here, do they work on both platforms; most of the popular ones do).
One thing I see that seems to not really have been dealt with is;
What is the target application expecting?
You mention you are building a library, so what application is going to use it and what does that application expect.
The constraint here being the target application dictates the most fundamental aspect of the system, the very tool used to built it. How is the application going to use the library;
What API and what kind of API is needed by or for that application?
What kind of API do you want to offer (C-style, vs. C++ classes, or a combination)?
What runtime is it using, will it be the same, or will there be conflicts?
Given these, and possible fact that the target application may still be unknown; maintain as much flexibility as possible. In this case, endeavour to maintain compatibility with gcc, mingw-w64 and msvc. They all offer a broad spectrum of C++11 language support (true, some more than others) and generally supported by other popular libraries (even if these other libraries are not needed right now).
I thought the comment by Hans Passant...
Do what works first
... really does apply here.
Since you mentioned it; the mingw-builds for mingw-w64 supports thread etc. with the posix build on Windows, both 64 bit and 32 bit.
I'm writing for sometime an wrapper library for my own programming language in C++.
Some of the most important intensions of my library is that it must be fast, easy, portable and lightweighted.
Currently it's depending on the Boost libraries. The problem with the boost libraries is that it's relatively large (file sizes). Also, it's depending on static libraries you have to build yourself. Compared to the prebuilt libraries coming with any native compiler (std), it's lacking on 2 out of the 4 intensions:
Easy - Users need to build boost itself
Lightweighted - Boost itself is about 100 MB
I was hoping for some advice, since currently I´m only using boost for purposes std doesn´t provide like threading, file searching and process creation (using unaccepted Boost.Process).
What is the best go for me, stay with boost, writing the libraries myself or maybe you guys know any other good librarie(s) which settle my needs?
Edit: This project is being developed with MinGW on Windows, for portability with other platforms (GCC).
Since the C++11 standard, C++ have threading built into the standard library.
I have a portable code running on Visual C++ 2008 and RHEL 5.3 (gcc 4.x.x).
My program should accept command line arguments. I consider using some library for that task.
My candidats are:
Boost program options
ACE has this capability too
(1) is not in standard and as for (2) we already using it heavily for other tasks.
Which is prefered one? Maybe there're other libraries out there?
I like a lot boost::PO, but I never used ACE, so I can't compare.
You're saying that boost is not a standard, but is it really a problem? Many people consider it as almost a standard. At least it isn't any exotic library.
Personally, I'd just use getopt.h on *nix and include something like http://doxygen.postgresql.org/getopt_8c-source.html in the build on windows.
Writing your own can be an option as well. It's not that hard of a problem to solve.
But if you're already using one of the libraries then that is the most obvious choice.
Does anyone have any experience with running C++ applications that use the boost libraries on uclibc-based systems? Is it even possible? Which C++ standard library would you use? Is uclibc++ usable with boost?
We use Boost together with GCC 2.95.3, libstdc++ and STLport on an ARMv4 platform running uClinux. Some parts of Boost are not compatible with GCC 2.x but the ones that are works well in our particular case. The libraries that we use the most are date_time, bind, function, tuple and thread.
Some of the libraries we had issues with were lambda, shared_pointer and format. These issues were most likely caused by our version of GCC since it has problems when you have too many includes or deep levels of template structures.
If possible I would recommend you to run the boost test suite with your particular toolchain to ensure compatibility. At the very least you could compile a native toolchain in order to ensure that your library versions are compatible.
We have not used uClibc++ because that is not what our toolchain provider recommends so I cannot comment on that particular combination.
We are using many of the Boost libraries (thread, filesystem, signals, function, bind, any, asio, smart_ptr, tuple) on an Arcom Vulcan which is admittedly pretty powerful for an embedded device (64M RAM, 533MHz XScale). Everything works beautifully.
GCC 3.4 but we're not using uclib++ (Arcom provides a toolchain which includes libstd++).
Many embedded devices will happily run many of the Boost libraries, assuming decent compiler support. Just take care with usage. The Boost libraries raise the level of abstraction and it can be easy to use more resources than you think.
I googled "uclibc stlport". It seems there are at least a few versions of uclibc for which stlport can be compiled (see this).
Given that, i'd say Boost is just a few compilation steps away. I have read a message by David Abrahams (who is an active member of the boost community) that says that Boost does not depend directly on the used libc. But some libraries may still cause problems, Boost.Python for instance, since it depends on something else (Python in my example) that might be difficult to compile with uclibc.
Hope this helps
I have not tried but I don't know anything about uclibc that would prevent Boost from working.
Try it and see what happens, I would say.
Yes you can use boost with uclibc.
I tried this with boost 1.45 & uclibc on ARM9260
Use fresh OpenEmbedded
Configure it to use Angstrom
Configure Angstrom to use uclibc
make boost - bitbake boost