WaitForMultipleObjects for Boost.Thread?

[Elysia]

I've been looking into Boost's thread library for threading, but I cannot seem to find equivalent functionality for the WinAPI WaitForMultipleObjects.
My need is simple.
I want to spawn n number of threads, and after having done so, wait until at least one of those threads have finished so that I can spawn additional threads.
WaitForMultipleObjects is ideal for this purpose, but I can't seem to find any such functionality in Boost.Thread?
Otherwise I would have to go polling every thread to see if they're finished and wait in-between (ie Sleep) making the solution non-portable.
Any ideas?

[grumpy]

Not all operating systems support functionality to wait on multiple threads. In fact, IIRC, it is an error under POSIX for a thread to join more than one other thread at a time.

Rather than waiting for threads to finish so you can start new ones, why not have your thread functions simply go to their beginning once they have finished? All that is needed then is a means of signalling, or providing data protected by a mutex, so you can tell the thread what to do next.

[Elysia]

That might be an idea... A little more complex approach, but it might work.
Yet, I find it silly that systems cannot wait on multiple threads to become signaled...
Thanks anyway!

[cyberfish]

Some people find it silly that some systems can't fork(), too .

[Elysia]

Never needed fork

[Cactus_Hugger]

That might be an idea... A little more complex approach, but it might work.
Yet, I find it silly that systems cannot wait on multiple threads to become signaled...
Thanks anyway!

And I find it silly that some systems cannot wait on more than 64 objects...

[Elysia]

That's silly, too. Theoretically it should be close to unlimited.
Bad OS. Bad.

[Elkvis]

boost::threads has a class called thread_group.... you can add as many threads as you want to it and then call join_all() on it, and it will do exactly what you are asking for

[Elysia]

Not quite. I wanted to stop waiting as soon as one thread finished.
But revamping the system, I'll always use the same amount of threads and let them share the data.
However, I still have to wait for all threads to terminate before the main thread terminates, so this actually does come in handy!
Thanks.