ThreadPool
A simple C++11 Thread Pool implementation
A tiny C++11 library that keeps a pool of worker threads ready so you can hand off background tasks and get results back via futures, without the cost of creating a new thread each time.
ThreadPool is a small C++ library that gives your program a pool of worker threads ready to run jobs in the background. Instead of creating and destroying a thread every time you need to do something in parallel, you create the pool once and keep reusing those threads for many tasks. This cuts down on the overhead that comes with spinning up threads on demand.
The library targets C++11, which is a version of the C++ language standard released in 2011. C++11 introduced built-in support for threads and futures, and this project builds directly on those features without pulling in any external framework. A future is a placeholder that holds the result of a task once it finishes, so you can hand work off to the pool and retrieve the answer later without blocking your main program right away.
Usage is brief: you create a ThreadPool with a number of worker threads, submit a function using enqueue, and get back a future. When you need the result, you call get on that future. The README shows a minimal example where a pool of four threads accepts a simple function and returns its value.
The README is sparse and does not document configuration options, thread-safety guarantees beyond the basic usage, error handling, or build instructions in detail. The project appears intended as a reference implementation or a copy-paste starting point rather than a fully documented library. If you need a thread pool for a C++ project and want to understand the mechanics behind the pattern, this code is a short and readable example to study.
Where it fits
- Add parallel background task execution to a C++ application without managing thread lifecycles manually.
- Study a short, readable reference implementation of the thread pool pattern in modern C++.
- Use as a copy-paste starting point for async task scheduling in a C++ project.
- Process a batch of independent CPU-bound tasks concurrently and collect all results.