Boost threads library, waiting on multiple conditions

From: mf_dylan_at_[hidden]
Date: 2001-10-11 20:36:49

I sent this as a mail to Bill Kempf first, he suggested I repost it 
here:

One thing though, how would I go about waiting on multiple 
conditions?  This is actually the norm in much of my multi-thread 
work...most of the time is spending waiting on various threads and 
conditions, usually one of them is a "shutdown" event, another is a 
checking for work to do etc. etc.  Doesn't seem to be any easy way of 
achieving this unless I'm missing something.
If some method for doing this was provided it would be arguably 
essential to be able to also wait on other threads terminating (and 
ideally other processes, but this is probably out of the scope of 
boost threads).  I had thought some time back about how something 
like this could be possible using an extendable scheme where objects 
provide "waitable" handles that can be, well, waited on!  I'm not 
exactly sure how you could go about doing this with pthreads to be 
honest, it doesn't seem to have anything close 
to "WaitForMultipleObjects".  I thought about doing it with select, 
but never got around to experimenting enough to be able to determine 
if that was viable.
 
Dylan