Is there a way to have a boost thread per object of a class?

Question

In my code I want to create a bunch of objects of a class and then give each object a separate thread so objects can all carry out actions at the same time as each other.

for (i = 0; i < ROBOTCOUNT; i++)
{
    Robot* r = new Robot;
    boost::thread t(r);
    robotList.push_back(r);
}

I want to do something like the code above. The code doesn't compile if it's like that, but that is the general idea of what I want. Does anyone know how to do what I want?

Thanks

Answer 1

The following code should work in C++11 and executes multiple Worker::foo()s in parallel:

#include <thread>
#include <memory>
#include <vector>

struct Worker
{
    void foo();
};

int main()
{
    std::vector<std::unique_ptr<Worker>> workers;
    std::vector<std::thread>             threads;

    workers.reserve(N);
    threads.reserve(N);

    for (unsigned int i = 0; i != N; ++i)
    {
        workers.emplace_back(new Worker);
        threads.emplace_back(&Worker::foo, workers.back().get());
    }

    // ... later ...

    for (auto & t : threads) { t.join(); }
}

---

You could even do without the unique pointers if you trust your element references to remain valid:

std::deque<Worker> workers;

// ...

for (unsigned int i = 0; i != N; ++i)
{
    workers.emplace_back(); // pray this doesn't invalidate
    threads.emplace_back(&Worker::foo, std::ref(workers.back()));
}