Understanding the thread processing in a Windows operating system
Let's move to a specific operating system that is widely used by many user computers, that is Windows. Our code must need to be run on some commercial platform from a leading OS vendor, such as Microsoft. So, we will now run the thread in Windows OS. In this OS, the thread is a kernel resource, which means it is an object that is created and owned by the OS kernel and lives in the kernel. The kernel itself is a core program that has complete control over everything in the system. In this section, we will develop a thread in Windows OS so our program can work well in this OS.
Working with handle
In the Windows operating system, handle is an abstract reference value to a resource. In this discussion, we will use the abstract reference to hold the thread. Let's suppose we have a threadProc()
function that will be called inside a thread which is held in the hnd
variable. The code will be as follows:
/* threadhandle.cpp */ ...