C++

A de novo genome assembler written in Python that leverages the assembly graph to output DNA sequences for each haplotype.

A C++ library to control the TLC5940 LED driver from your Raspberry Pi

Welcome to this second part in a series of articles about multithreading with C++11. In the previous part, I briefly explained what a thread is, and how to create one with the new C++ thread library. This time, we will be writing a lot more code, so open up your favourite IDE if you want to try the examples while you’re reading.

In the previous article we also saw that sometimes, the output wasn’t completely right when running multiple threads simultaneously. Today, we’ll see that there are some other problems with sharing a resource between threads, and of course, provide some solutions to these problems.

The free lunch is over. The time that our complex algorithm was running extremely slow on a computer, but ran extremely fast a few years later, because the processor speeds exploded, is gone. The trend with current processors is to add more cores, rather than increasing the clock frequency.

As programmer, you should be aware of this. Of course, processors will always perform a bit better each year, but the growth in performance is slowing down. Currently, a lot of programs can benefit the most by using multiple threads, because of today’s multicore processors.

In this article I’ll briefly explain what a thread is, and how you can create them with the new threading library in C++11. I’m planning to write multiple articles about this topic, each going a little bit more in depth.