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MintSystem

MintSystem is a portable API for thread creation, semaphores, time and date services, sleep, and thread and process IDs. Basically, the system services you need in order to run lock-free code in the first place, plus a few extras. If your project requires a more complete set of PThreads functionality, and you still want Windows compatibility, you might be interested in the PThreads-Win32 project.

To use MintSystem in your project, add the top-level include/ folder to your include path, then include the appropriate headers such as <mintsystem/thread.h>. To use MintSystem on UNIX-like platforms, including Linux, MacOS or iOS, you must also compile and link using the -pthread option.

On all platforms, you must also compile and link with a lib built from the appropriate source in the src/mintsystem/ folder. There’s a CMakeLists.txt located there, so you can use CMake to generate this lib for you. See the tests for some examples of how it’s used.

Thread Creation

You can use the following functions to create threads and wait for threads to complete. These are roughly inspired by POSIX thread creation functions, pthread_create and pthread_join.

mint_thread_t is an opaque pointer type which represents a handle to the thread. The first argument to mint_thread_create is actually a pointer to a pointer which receives the new handle.

#include <mintsystem/thread.h>

int mint_thread_create(mint_thread_t *thread, void *(*start_routine) (void *), void *arg);
int mint_thread_join(mint_thread_t thread, void **retval);

Semaphores

You can use the following functions to create, manipulate and destroy semaphores. These are different from POSIX semaphores, though they share a similar API.

#include <mintsystem/semaphore.h>

mint_sem_t *mint_sem_create();
int mint_sem_destroy(mint_sem_t *sem);
int mint_sem_post(mint_sem_t *sem);
int mint_sem_wait(mint_sem_t *sem);

These functions provide unnamed semaphores even on Apple operating systems, which do not natively support them. Since the semaphores are unnamed, they cannot be shared between different processes.

Unlike a POSIX semaphore, mint_sem_wait is guaranteed never to return early with an EINTR error due to a signal interrupt. It is presumed that nobody using Mintomic semaphores will care about signal interrupts. On several platforms, including some configurations of Xcode and iOS, every debug event causes a signal interrupt, which would otherwise break the logic of the application being debugged. Mintomic semaphores protect you from this particular surprise.

Timers

Mintomic provides portable functions for low-overhead, high-resolution timers suitable for timing sections of code in the 0.5 microsecond range and up.

#include <mintsystem/timer.h>

extern double mint_timer_secondsToTicks;
extern double mint_timer_ticksToSeconds;

int mint_timer_is_initialized();
void mint_timer_initialize();
double mint_timer_getSecondsToTicks();
mint_timer_tick_t mint_timer_get();
int mint_timer_greater_or_equal(mint_timer_tick_t a, mint_timer_tick_t b);

mint_timer_initialize only initializes the conversion ratios mint_timer_ticksToSeconds and mint_timer_secondsToTicks, which are provided for convenience. You can safely call any other function without calling mint_timer_initialize first.

mint_timer_get returns mint_timer_tick_t values. You can subtract these values to obtain timing deltas, then convert them to and from seconds by using the convenience conversion ratios. Use mint_timer_greater_or_equal to determine whether b is not earlier than a in time; it handles wrap-around. Call mint_timer_getSecondsToTicks to obtain the conversion ratio without calling mint_timer_initialize first; it queries the value from the system each time.

Sleep

Sleep for a specified number of milliseconds.

#include <mintsystem/timer.h>

void mint_sleep_millis(int millis);

On systems where cores have two hardware threads, mint_yield_hw_thread will generate a CPU instruction to yield to the other hardware thread. Thread Synchronizer uses this internally.

#include <mintsystem/timer.h>

void mint_yield_hw_thread();

Date and Time

mint_get_current_utc_time returns the number of microseconds since January 1, 1601 in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). MintPack’s Random uses this internally.

#include <mintsystem/datetime.h>

uint64_t mint_get_current_utc_time();

Thread and Process IDs

You can lookup the current thread and process IDs. These basically return the values you’d expect on each platform. On Xbox 360, mint_get_current_process_id always returns 0.

#include <mintsystem/tid.h>

mint_tid_t mint_get_current_thread_id();
mint_pid_t mint_get_current_process_id();