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Creating and Managing Threads

In Mac OS X, each process (application) is made up of one or more threads. Each thread represents a single stream of execution for the application's code. Every application starts with a single thread, which runs the application's main function. Applications can spawn additional threads, each of which executes the code of a specific function.

When an application spawns a new thread, that thread becomes an independent entity inside of the application's process space. Each thread has its own execution stack and is scheduled for runtime separately by the kernel. A thread can communicate with other threads and other processes, perform I/O operations, and do anything else you might need it to do. Because they are inside the same process space, however, all threads in a single application share the same virtual memory space and have the same access rights as the process itself.

This chapter provides an overview of the thread technologies available in Mac OS X and examples of how to use those technologies in your applications.

Contents:

About Mac OS X Threads
Creating a Thread
Creating POSIX Threads in a Cocoa Application
Configuring Threads
Terminating a Thread

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