Without realizing what I was getting myself into, I wrote some code using C11’s threads.h (EDIT: every time I use the angle brackets < and they just get eaten, even in the code snippet block.) I’m realizing after the fact that this is basically only supported on Linux (gcc/clang). This is my target platform, but I guess if I could cross compile to Windows or macOS that would be nice, too.
C’s threads nominally appear to be a great feature. Finally, a standardized and straightforward interface to threads that would be cross-platform compatible. The reality appears to be anything but.
So is it worth just replacing that code with pthreads? Is there some near-term development on C threads that might make this worthwhile to use? I’m kind of surprised it hasn’t really caught on some 12 years after the standard was introduced.
pthreads is fine and widely supported. I would probably recommend that interface for now. Maybe after 5 years or so when all of the LTS systems support the new standard that will be the better option, but all major OSes are POSIX compatible so no need for a new standard anyways.
Also if you want to take advantage of any OS-specific extensions they are probably supported by pthreads, but the new C threads API will probably lag.