Concurrency in games – creating a thread

The first step of writing multithreaded code is to spawn a thread. At this point, we must note that the application is already running an active thread, the main thread. So when we spawn a thread, there will be two active threads in the application.

Getting ready

To work through this recipe, you will need a machine running Windows and Visual Studio. No other prerequisites are required.

How to do it…

In this recipe, we will see how easy it is to spawn a thread. Add a source file called Source.cpp and add the following code to it:

int ThreadOne()
{
  std::cout << "I am thread 1" << std::endl;
  return 0;
}

int main()
{
  std::thread T1(ThreadOne);

  if (T1.joinable()) // Check if can be joined to the main thread
    T1.join();     // Main thread waits for this to finish

  _getch();
  return 0;
}

How it works…

The first step is to include the header file, thread.h. This gives us access to all the inbuilt libraries that we may need to create our...