Pthreads vs. OpenMP

Question

I\'m creating a multi-threaded application in C using Linux.

I\'m unsure whether I should use the POSIX thread API or the OpenMP API.

What are the pros &

Answer 1

OpenMP has the advantages of being cross platform, and simpler for some operations. It handles threading in a different manner, in that it gives you higher level threading options, such as parallelization of loops, such as:

#pragma omp parallel for
for (i = 0; i < 500; i++)
    arr[i] = 2 * i;

If this interests you, and if C++ is an option, I'd also recommend Threading Building Blocks.

Pthreads is a lower level API for generating threads and synchronization explicitly. In that respect, it provides more control.