c++ - How to enable experimental C++11 concurrency features in MinGW?

Question

When trying to compile the following code

#include <thread>
#include <iostream>

void foo() { std::cout << "foo
"; }

int main()
{
  std::thread t(foo);
  t.join();
}

I get an error:

C:Test>g++ -g -Wall -lpthread -std=c++0x
main.cpp
main.cpp: In function 'int main()':
main.cpp:12:2: error: 'thread' is not a member of 'std'
main.cpp:12:14: error: expected ';' before 't'
main.cpp:13:2: error: 't' has not been declared

How to use C++11 experimental concurrency features? I have MinGW GCC 4.5.1 (TDM)

EDIT: BTW, Visual Studio 2012 performs good this code sample.

Answer 1

To the best of my knowledge, MinGW does not support yet the new c++0x concurrency features (as of GCC 4.5). I remember reading a mailing list exchange in which it was pointed out that in MinGW the following ifdef from the thread header is not satisfied:

#if defined(_GLIBCXX_HAS_GTHREADS)

I guess this is somehow related to the way MinGW is built under Windows, whether it uses native threads or pthread, etc. In my code, I've written some minimal wrapping that uses Boost.thread instead of native c++0x threads when in Windows. The two interfaces are very similar and for many uses they can be swapped without issues.

EDIT: Thanks to Luc Danton for digging out the mailing list thread mentioned above:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.mingw.user/33065