Work-Stealing Queue

A fast single-header work-stealing queue template written in modern C++17

How to Use

A work-stealing queue enables one thread (queue owner) to push/pop items into/from one end of the queue, and multiple threads (thieves) to steal items from the other end. The following example shows the basic use of wsq.hpp.

// work-stealing queue of integer numbers
WorkStealingQueue<int> queue;

// only one thread can push and pop items from one end
std::thread owner([&] () {
  for(int i=0; i<100000000; i=i+1) {
    queue.push(i);
  }
  while(!queue.empty()) {
    std::optional<int> item = queue.pop();
  }
});

// multiple threads can steal items from the other end
std::thread thief([&] () {
  while(!queue.empty()) {
    std::optional<int> item = queue.steal();
  }
});

owner.join();
thief.join();

The library is a single header file. Simply compile your source with include path to wsq.hpp.

Compile Examples and Unittests

We use cmake to manage the package. We recommand using out-of-source build:

~$ mkdir build
~$ cd build
~$ cmake ..
~$ make & make test

Technical Details

This library implements the work-stealing queue algorithm described in the paper, "Correct and Efficient Work-Stealing for Weak Memory Models," published by Nhat Minh Lê, Antoniu Pop, Albert Cohen, and Francesco Zappa Nardelli at 2013 ACM Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP).

Robustness

This library is part of the Cpp-Taskflow project. It has experienced thousands of tests in both micro-benchmarks and large-scale real-world parallel applications.