Thread Safety

In general, it is safe to make concurrent use of distinct objects, but unsafe to make concurrent use of a single object. However, types such as io_service provide a stronger guarantee that it is safe to use a single object concurrently.

Thread Pools

Multiple threads may call io_service::run() to set up a pool of threads from which completion handlers may be invoked. This approach may also be used with io_service::post() to use a means to perform any computational tasks across a thread pool.

Note that all threads that have joined an io_service's pool are considered equivalent, and the io_service may distribute work across them in an arbitrary fashion.

Internal Threads

The implementation of this library for a particular platform may make use of one or more internal threads to emulate asynchronicity. As far as possible, these threads must be invisible to the library user. In particular, the threads:

This approach is complemented by the following guarantee:

Consequently, it is the library user's responsibility to create and manage all threads to which the notifications will be delivered.

The reasons for this approach include:

See Also

io_service.