Mike McNally

If you are experienced in using the POSIX threads package (pthread) in C or C++, one of the first things you may have noticed while learning Java is that thread semantics is one area where Java's designers did not try to emulate C semantics. The next thing you may have noticed is that the Java approach seems awkward in many circumstances. For instance, consider the timer() method shown in Listing 1. You might want to add a method like this to a long-running application to reassure yourself that your Java Virtual Machine has not gotten hung. Since this method contains an infinite loop, it only makes sense to run it in its own thread. The POSIX threads model allows you to pass a function pointer and an argument pointer to the pthread_create() method. The specified function is executed in its own thread of control and the argument pointer can be used to pass data stru... (more)