Ensuring task execution order in threadpool

Question

I have been reading about the thread-pool pattern and I can\'t seem to find the usual solution for the following problem.

I sometimes want tasks to be executed serial

Answer 1

I think you're mixing concepts. Threadpool is ok when you want to distribute some work among threads but if you start mixing dependencies between threads then it isn't such a good idea.

My advice, simply don't use the threadpool for those tasks. Just create a dedicated thread and keep a simple queue of sequential items that must be processed by that thread alone. Then you can keep pushing tasks to the thread pool when you don't have a sequential requirement and use the dedicated thread when you have.

A clarification: Using common sense, a queue of serial tasks shall be executed by a single thread processing each task one after another :)