The above answers are good, but in my case, 1st approach that converts the function to be a static didn't work. I was trying to convert exiting code to move into thread function but that code had lots to references to non-static class members already. The second solution of encapsulating into C++ object works, but has 3-level wrappers to run a thread.
I had an alternate solution that uses existing C++ construct - 'friend' function, and it worked perfect for my case. An example of how I used 'friend' (will use the above same example for names showing how it can be converted into a compact form using friend)
class MyThreadClass
{
public:
MyThreadClass() {/* empty */}
virtual ~MyThreadClass() {/* empty */}
bool Init()
{
return (pthread_create(&_thread, NULL, &ThreadEntryFunc, this) == 0);
}
/** Will not return until the internal thread has exited. */
void WaitForThreadToExit()
{
(void) pthread_join(_thread, NULL);
}
private:
//our friend function that runs the thread task
friend void* ThreadEntryFunc(void *);
pthread_t _thread;
};
//friend is defined outside of class and without any qualifiers
void* ThreadEntryFunc(void *obj_param) {
MyThreadClass *thr = ((MyThreadClass *)obj_param);
//access all the members using thr->
return NULL;
}
Ofcourse, we can use boost::thread and avoid all these, but I was trying to modify the C++ code to not use boost (the code was linking against boost just for this purpose)