Windows threads

Relative to Pthreads, Windows threads are limited to Windows operating systems and similar (for example ReactOS, and other OS's using Wine). This provides a fairly consistent implementation, easily defined by the Windows version that the support corresponds to.

Prior to Windows Vista, threading support missed features such as condition variables, while having features not found in Pthreads. Depending on one's perspective, having to use the countless "type def" types defined by the Windows headers can be a bother as well.

Thread management

A basic example of using Windows threads, as adapted from the official MSDN documentation sample code, looks like this:

#include <windows.h> 
#include <tchar.h> 
#include <strsafe.h> 

#define MAX_THREADS 3 
#define BUF_SIZE 255  

After including a series of Windows-specific headers for the thread functions, character strings, and more, we define the number of threads we wish to create as well as the size of the message buffer...