How to launch a thread in Windows versus POSIX

This is the simplest code I can think of to show launching a thread in windows - you can use the C sandbox.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <windows.h>

DWORD ThreadProc(void* pObject){
   printf("Hello thread %li\n", (long)pObject);
   return 0;
}

int main(){
   DWORD ThreadId;
   HANDLE ThreadHandle = CreateThread(NULL,0,&ThreadProc,(void*)111, 0, &ThreadId);
   printf("Hello world of C!\n");
   Sleep(1);    
   return 0;
}

Without the sleep call the program can exit before we have a change to run the thread. This is what we see when we run it:

C:\Users\eliotmuir\scratch\core\sandbox_c>test
Hello world of C!
Hello thread 111

This is what the same code looks like with pthreads (the name of the POSIX threads):

#include <stdio.h>
#include <pthread.h>

void* ThreadProc(void* pObject){
   printf("Hello thread %li\n", (long)pObject);
   return 0;
}

int main(){
   printf("Hello world of C!\n");
   pthread_t Thread;
   int Result = pthread_create(&Thread, NULL, &ThreadProc, (void*)111);
   pthread_detach(Thread);
   return 0;
}

With POSIX threads one would need to call pthread_join to clean up thread thread when it is done if we didn’t call pthread_detach. I think this is really what I would see as unnecessary flexibility in the pthread library - at least based on my experience of how the applications I have architected end up using threads.

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How to launch a thread in Windows versus POSIX

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