Registration is now open for CppCon 2021, which starts on October 24 and will be held both in person and online. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting videos of some of the top-rated talks from our most recent in-person conference in 2019 and our online conference in 2020. Here’s another CppCon talk video we hope you will enjoy – and why not register today for CppCon 2021 to attend in person, online, or both!

Get Off My Thread: Techniques for Moving Work to Background Threads

by Anthony Williams

Summary of the talk:

If you're writing a GUI application and you want the interface to feel "responsive" to the user then you need the code that response to UI events to be short and fast. Similarly, if you are handling network I/O you may not want the processing of one request to prevent the system receiving further input.

If the work to be done in response to an event is complex and time consuming then you can maintain the "responsiveness" of the system by passing the work off to a background thread.

This talk will look at the ways of doing this, including managing ongoing work, providing progress updates, and cancelling work if it is no longer needed.