What is the proper way of doing event handling in C++?

Question

I have an application that needs to respond to certain events in the following manner:

void someMethodWithinSomeClass() {
    while (true) {
        wait for         


        

Answer 1

C++ does not have built-in support for events. You would have to implement some kind of thread-safe task queue. Your main message-processing thread would continually get items off this queue and process them.

A good example of this is standard Win32 message pump that drives windows applications:

 int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow)
 {
   MSG msg;
   while(GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0) > 0)
   {
     TranslateMessage(&msg);
     DispatchMessage(&msg);
   }
   return msg.wParam;
 }

Other threads can Post a message to a window, which will then be handled by this thread.

This uses C rather than C++, but it illustrates the approach.