Can I get Unix s pthread h to compile in Windows

Question

If I try to compile a program with   include  lt pthread h gt    in it  I get the error   pthread h  No such file or directory   Is it possible to get this to compile in a Windows environment   I am using Vista with the latest MinGW   I do not want to use the Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX Version 3 5 as I will have to move this to a Unix environment

User · Accepted Answer

pthread h is a header for the Unix Linux  POSIX  API for threads  A POSIX layer such as Cygwin would probably compile an app with  include  lt pthreads h gt    The native Windows threading API is exposed via  include  lt windows h gt  and it works slightly differently to Linux s threading   Still  there s a replacement  glue  library maintained at http   sourceware org pthreads-win32    note that it has some slight incompatibilities with MinGW VS  e g  see here

User · Answer

Just pick up the TDM-GCC 64x package   It constains both the 32 and 64 bit versions of the MinGW toolchain and comes within a neat installer   More importantly  it contains something called the  winpthread  library   It comprises of the pthread h header  libwinpthread a  libwinpthread dll a static libraries for both 32-bit and 64-bit and the required  dlls libwinpthread-1 dll and libwinpthread 64-1 dll this  as of 01-06-2016    You ll need to link to the libwinpthread a library during build  Other than that  your code can be the same as for native Pthread code on Linux  I ve so far successfully used it to compile a few basic Pthread programs in 64-bit on windows    Alternatively  you can use the following library which wraps the windows threading API into the pthreads API  pthreads-win32   The above two seem to be the most well known ways for this   Hope this helps

User · Answer

As  Ninefingers mentioned  pthreads are unix-only  Posix only  really    That said  Microsoft does have a library that duplicates pthreads   Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX Version 3 5  Library Download

User · Answer

There are  as i recall  two distributions of the gnu toolchain for windows  mingw and cygwin   I d expect cygwin work - a lot of effort has been made to make that a  stadard  posix environment   The mingw toolchain uses msvcrt dll for its runtime and thus will probably expose msvcrt s  thread  api   beginthread which is defined in  lt process h gt

User · Answer

pthread h isn t on Windows   But Windows has extensive threading functionality  beginning with CreateThread   My advice is don t get caught looking at WinAPI through the lens of another system s API   These systems are different   It s like insisting on riding the Win32 bike with your comfortable Linux bike seat   Well  the seat might not fit right and in some cases it ll just fall off   Threads pretty much work the same on different systems  you have ThreadPools and mutexes   Having worked with both pthreads and Windows threads  I can say the Windows threading offers quite a bit more functionality than pthread does   Learning another API is pretty easy  just think in terms of the concepts  mutex  etc   then look up how to create one of those on MSDN

[c] Can I get Unix's pthread.h to compile in Windows?

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