Thread: passing pointers

Hi,

I'm looking up pthreads and it's going ok, but I'm getting a little confused with the (void *) casting, so I was hoping sombody could explain what exactly the variable t is when it is passed to the PrintHello function below. From my understanding, t holds as an example, 0 on the first run through the loop; it's then cast as type (void *) which makes it a pointer, but it's value is taken literally in the function when it is recast as an int, it isn't dereferenced, does this mean that the address t points to is 0? Isn't that usually a bad idea as that memory address could be reserved or whatever? Is this just a workaround for pthread's need for void* types?

Code:

void *PrintHello(void *threadid)
{
   int tid;
   tid = (int)threadid;
   printf("Hello World! It's me, thread #%d!\n", tid);
   pthread_exit(NULL);
}

int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
   pthread_t threads[NUM_THREADS];
   int rc, t;
   for(t=0; t<NUM_THREADS; t++){
      printf("In main: creating thread %d\n", t);
      rc = pthread_create(&threads[t], NULL, PrintHello, (void *)t);
      if (rc){
         printf("ERROR; return code from pthread_create() is %d\n", rc);
         exit(-1);
      }
   }
   pthread_exit(NULL);
}

sorry excuse my laziness, I realised I just needed a few printf statements to find out what's happening. So it uses pointers with whatever value t has at that point, which is necessary because that's the way the pthread library is written. I'm guessing it's a bad idea otherwise.

It's a bad idea anyway. While C allows for the conversion between an int and a pointer, it doesn't guarantee that the result will be valid. I would guess that on most, if not all POSIX systems, it will do what you would expect. But it's still dodgy code.

Unfortunately, doing it properly is somewhat more annoying, because you have to pass the address of something. You can get away with passing the address of a local variable if that variable does not go out of scope while your thread is running. Otherwise, you'll have to malloc() some space, which is even more annoying. But it is the proper way to do it.

So would the following code be ok?

Code:

#include<stdio.h>
#include<stdlib.h>

void doStuff( void *sock );

int main()
{
    int *sock = malloc(sizeof(sock));
    *sock = 3;
    doStuff( (void *)sock );
    free(sock);
    return 0;
}

void doStuff( void *sock )
{
    int *socket = (int *)sock;
    printf("&#37;d\n", *socket);
}

I'm just wondering if you could make that more efficient? It seems a waste to declare a whole new variable just to change the type.