Thursday, June 10, 2010

Version 2.0 Beta Program

My silence over the last few months is due to overwork in preparing a version update to QuickThread. Version 2.0 will include support for running on Linux.

Major internal changes were made to accommodate a single source QuickThread scheduler, with a few conditional compilation directives, that works for both Windows and Linux operating systems.

Preliminary testing has been performed on Ubuntu 10.0 and with g++ 4.5 (pre-release). g++ 4.4 works too however the c++0x Lambda functions are not available in g++ 4.4.

Externally your programs will run with little or no change other than being required to be re-compiled.

Exposed API difference mainly concern a different layout for the qtControl structure and some member functions called by the templates.

The internal changes relate to using pthreads on Linux to establish the QuickThread tread pool, while permitting Windows native threads on Windows.

On Linux the maximum number of compute class threads is 1024. This can be expanded but would require a recompilation of the libQuickThread.a library.

Using Windows native threads (not on Wndows 7) the upper compute class thread count is 64. If interest develops for more than 64 threads on Windows 7 then this issue can be addressed at that time.

For those interested in participating in the beta program, please contact me via my email address on www.quickthreadprogramming.com

Jim