Are condition variables officially supported?

[christian_conveygmai]

Hi guys,

Can anyone tell me what's going on with TBB support for condition variables?

I'm developing an app that is using TBB for multi-tasking, and I need condition variables.  I found an article here:  http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2010/10/01/condition-variable-support-in-intel-threading-building-blocks suggesting that they're supported by TBB.  

But the condition_variable header file is burried in the "compat" subdirectory, and it doesn't show up in the HTML docs for TBB 4.0 (update 1).  That makes me wonder if the condition_variable class is going away soon, or is in some other way unsupported.

Is the idea that TBB really wants me to be using C++11's condtion_variable class, and this is just a nicety for compilers which don't yet support that part of C++11?  

[RafSchietekat]

Is the idea that TBB really wants me to be using C++11's condtion_variable class, and this is just a nicety for compilers which don't yet support that part of C++11?

Yes. Note that the class is not used by anything else in TBB (4.1 update 2), and that blocking on a mutex should be avoided inside a TBB task (blocking leads to undersubscription or worse), where a dummy_task dependency may be an appropriate replacement for a condition_variable.

[christian_conveygmai]

Okay, thanks.  Apparently I'm not as up on C++11 features as I should have been, or else I would have noticed the the concurrency constructs in Boost and TBB were basically drop-in replacements for those in C++11.

[RafSchietekat]

My impression is that boost often leads new standard functionality.