Get Off My Thread: Techniques for Moving Work to Background Threads
summary
Argues that spawning a thread per event is hopeless and recommends either a dedicated background thread for ordered single threaded processing or a thread pool for scalable parallelism with explicit continuations to preserve ordering. Shows practical tools and patterns: std::thread std::jthread std::async stop token style cancellation via stop_token for cooperative cancellation, counting pending tasks plus atomic wait for shutdown, and posting GUI messages or eventfd to marshal progress updates back to the event loop.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:48Why do we need to move work off the current thread?
- 5:04Aside: Non-Blocking vs Lock-free
- 10:05Spawning new threads
- 11:37Managing thread handles
- 27:58Thread pools: upsides
- 29:42Thread pools: downsides
- 34:49Addressing thread pool downsides
- 39:42Cancellation: Stop tokens
- 42:22Cancellation: Counting outstanding tasks
- 49:37Coroutines: example
- 52:52Guidelines
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