First-class threads in C++

A library package to provice threads in C++ as first-class objects. From the introduction:

The main goal of RT++ however is to provide a programming interface which is considerably higher-level than that of comparable packages. RT++ considers threads as an abstract datatype with a functional interface i.e. threads communicate only via arguments (which are provided when the thread is defined) and results (which are delivered when the thread has terminated). Threads can be used like objects of any other type i.e. they can be stored in data structures, passed as thread arguments, and returned as thread results. Functional programming languages are called higher-order if they treat functions as first-order objects; we call RT++ higher-order because it treats threads in this way.

And:

RT++ provides a thread/memory management system where programmers need not care about these low-level issues. Thread resources are implicitly allocated as late as possible and implicitly freed as early as possible regardless whether or how often the thread result is retrieved. Threads are subject to garbage collection and automatically reclaimed when not referenced any more. RT++ also provides type constructors for arrays, lists, and general pointer structures whose objects can be passed by reference among threads and that are subject to automatic garbage collection. A high-level notion of non-determinism is supported via thread bags which retrieve their result in the order in which they become available and thus allow to write more abstract (and sometimes more efficient) parallel programs.

This is one reason I prefer C++ to Java for some of my programming — choice. Try replacing java.lang.Thread.