mingw-w64 threads posix vs win32

Question

I m installing mingw-w64 on Windows and there are two options  win32 threads and posix threads  I know what is the difference between win32 threads and pthreads but I don t understand what is the difference between these two options  I doubt that if I will choose posix threads it will prevent me from calling WinAPI functions like CreateThread   It seems that this option specify which threading API will be used by some program or library  but by what  By GCC  libstdc   or by something else   I found this  Whats the difference between thread posixs and thread win32 in gcc port of windows      In short  for this version of mingw  the threads-posix release will use the posix API and allow the use of std  thread  and the threads-win32 will use the win32 API  and disable the std  thread part of the standard    Ok  if I will select win32 threads then std  thread will be unavailable but win32 threads will still be used  But used by what

User · Answer

Parts of the GCC runtime  the exception handling  in particular  are dependent on the threading model being used  So  if you re using the version of the runtime that was built with POSIX threads  but decide to create threads in your own code with the Win32 APIs  you re likely to have problems at some point   Even if you re using the Win32 threading version of the runtime you probably shouldn t be calling the Win32 APIs directly  Quoting from the MinGW FAQ      As MinGW uses the standard Microsoft C runtime library which comes with Windows  you should be careful and use the correct function to generate a new thread  In particular  the CreateThread function will not setup the stack correctly for the C runtime library  You should use  beginthreadex instead  which is  almost  completely compatible with CreateThread

User · Answer

GCC comes with a compiler runtime library  libgcc  which it uses for  among other things  providing a low-level OS abstraction for multithreading related functionality in the languages it supports  The most relevant example is libstdc   s C  11  lt thread gt    lt mutex gt   and  lt future gt   which do not have a complete implementation when GCC is built with its internal Win32 threading model  MinGW-w64 provides a winpthreads  a pthreads implementation on top of the Win32 multithreading API  which GCC can then link in to enable all the fancy features   I must stress this option does not forbid you to write any code you want  it has absolutely NO influence on what API you can call in your code   It only reflects what GCC s runtime libraries  libgcc libstdc        use for their functionality  The caveat quoted by  James has nothing to do with GCC s internal threading model  but rather with Microsoft s CRT implementation   To summarize    posix  enable C  11 C11 multithreading features  Makes libgcc depend on libwinpthreads  so that even if you don t directly call pthreads API  you ll be distributing the winpthreads DLL  There s nothing wrong with distributing one more DLL with your application  win32  No C  11 multithreading features    Neither have influence on any user code calling Win32 APIs or pthreads APIs  You can always use both

User · Answer

Note that it is now possible to use some of C  11 std  thread in the win32 threading mode  These header-only adapters worked out of the box for me  https   github com meganz mingw-std-threads  From the revision history it looks like there is some recent attempt to make this a part of the mingw64 runtime

[windows] mingw-w64 threads: posix vs win32

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