fivethread

Fivethread is a term used in programming education to describe a fixed-size thread pool consisting of five worker threads. The concept centers on providing a small, predictable level of parallelism by constraining concurrency to five simultaneous tasks. Implementations typically expose a compact API for submitting work, waiting for completion, and collecting results, while avoiding more complex features found in larger concurrency frameworks.

Origin and scope: Fivethread emerged in tutorials and sample projects as a didactic construct to illustrate fixed-size pools, task queues, and basic synchronization. Rather than referring to a single standard library, multiple language-specific versions exist, each adapting the idea to the host language's primitives.

Architecture and API: A typical fivethread design includes a fixed pool of five worker threads, a bounded task queue, and lightweight synchronization primitives such as a barrier or a condition variable. Common operations include submit(task) to enqueue work, join() to wait for all tasks to finish, and shutdown() to terminate workers. Some variants expose futures or promises so callers can retrieve task results asynchronously.

Usage and semantics: Users create an instance of the five-thread pool, submit a set of tasks, and then join or poll for completion. The fixed size helps prevent oversubscription and limits resource usage, making it well suited for embarrassingly parallel workloads or instructional exercises.

Limitations and context: Because the thread count is fixed at five, fivethread cannot automatically scale to larger parallel workloads. It is primarily used as an educational example or in small-scale applications where deterministic concurrency is desirable.