Explore the full potential of C++ by mastering the standard library.

Become a C++ Programmer

The C++ standard library is a collection of all the tools and utilities available in C++. It received its latest update in 2017, known as C++17. The update introduces many new features that further optimize our code. This module will help us fully grasp C++ and use it to its full potential.

C++ Standard Library

C++ gets with the 2011 published C++ standard a multithreading library. This library has basic building blocks like atomic variables, threads, locks, and condition variables. That's the base on which future C++ standards can build higher abstractions. But C++11 already knows tasks, which provide a higher abstraction than the cited basic building blocks. 

At a low level, C++11 provides for the first time a memory model and atomic variables. Both components are the foundation for *well-defined* behavior in multithreading programming.

# Threads
A new [thread](#chapterXXXthreads) in C++ will immediately start its work. It can run in the foreground or background and gets its data by copy or reference.

# Shared Variables
The access to shared variables between threads has to be coordinated. This coordination can be done in different ways with mutexes or locks. But often it's sufficient to protect the initialization of the data as it will be immutable during its lifetime.

# Thread-Local Variable
Declaring a variable as [thread-local](#chapterXXXthreadSSSlocal) ensures that a thread gets its own copy, so there is no conflict.

# Condition variables
[Condition variables](#chapterXXXconditionSSSvariable) are a classic solution to implement sender-receiver workflows. The key idea is that the sender notifies the receiver when it's done with its work so that the receiver can start. 

# Tasks
[Tasks](#chapterXXXtask) have a lot in common with threads. But while a programmer explicitly creates a thread, a task will be implicitly created by the C++ runtime. Tasks are like data channels. The promise puts data into the data channel; the future picks the value up. The data can be a value, an exception or simply a notification. 

Now, let's talk about how we can use libraries in C++.

Now, we will talk about how C++11 supports and implements multithreaded programming.

Multithreading