The standard library that ships with the new C++11 contains a set of classes to use threads. Before this, we needed to use the OS specific thread facilities each OS provides making our programs hard to port to other platforms.

Anyway, as today (November 16th, 2012), I tried threads using g++ 4.7 in Linux, Windows (through mingw), Mac and NetBSD and I just had success in Linux, Windows and Mac do not implement the thread features and NetBSD misses some details on the implementation (the this_thread::sleep_for() method, for example). Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 ships with good thread support.

To define a thread, we need to use the template class std::thread and we need to pass it a function pointer, a lambda expression or a functor. Look at this example:

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