POCO

The POCO library is a fairly lightweight wrapper around operating system functionality. It does not require a C++11 compatible compiler or any kind of pre-compiling or meta-compiling.

Thread class

The Thread class is a simple wrapper around an OS-level thread. It takes Worker class instances which inherit from the Runnable class. The official documentation provides a basic example of this as follows:

#include "Poco/Thread.h" 
#include "Poco/Runnable.h" 
#include <iostream> 

class HelloRunnable: public Poco::Runnable { 
    virtual void run() { 
        std::cout << "Hello, world!" << std::endl; 
    } 
}; 

int main(int argc, char** argv) { 
    HelloRunnable runnable; 
    Poco::Thread thread; 
    thread.start(runnable); 
    thread.join(); 
    return 0; 
} 

This preceding code is a very simple "Hello world" example with a worker which only outputs a string via the standard output. The thread instance is allocated on the stack, and kept within the scope of the entry...