How to implement a blocking queue in C++ to process data between threads?

Question

I need to make an app that will have two threads. One will produce data (file paths and an action to be performed for that path - create/update/delete) and the other thread will need to consume this data and actually perform the tasks.

For this I thought to have a queue and from one thread to put data in it and from the other to take the items and performa the actions sequentially.

My problem is how do I make this data to be shareable between these threads and then how can I make the second thread to block while waiting for data to be put in the queue? Just having a while to check if queue is not empty would eat CPU like crazy for nothing. Adding a "sleep" to check every few milliseconds or seconds would not be efficient.

How can this be done? Any libraries that implement such data?

Answer 1

A couple of examples for you:

• Intel TBB concurrent_bounded_queue.
• EventQueue with usage example.
• Detailed design explanation of building a concurrent queue.
• Another concurrent queue, along with benchmark comparisons against TBB and Boost.