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This is good advice and should never have attracted a downvote!

I'm not actually sure that the C++ library does anything that pthreads doesn't - maybe std::lock, perhaps? - but it's more convenient to use (and it's not like pthreads is bad to start with...), and the pieces work well and fit together quite nicely. Some good use of move semantics. unique_lock is neat and you can do stuff like vector<thread>.

The C++ thread library works on Windows, too...

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> I'm not actually sure that the C++ library does anything that pthreads doesn't

There’s std::atomic, which didn’t have a standardized equivalent in pthreads. In lieu of that you’d see some ad-hoc combination of GCC builtins, OS-specific functions, and `volatile`, with the result often not guaranteed to work on architectures other than x86 (if at all). Compared to that, std::atomic is both more flexible and easier to get right. The C ‘backport’, stdatomic.h, is also available on most platforms these days...

I was thinking about mostly about atomics, which aren't covered by pthreads; and I can't remember shared mutexes being supported either.

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