Reading and writing different files in their own threads from my main loop in C++11 - multithreading

Question

I am trying to understand, then, write some code that has to read from, and write to many different files and do so from the main loop of my application. I am hoping to use the C++11 model present in VS 2013.
I don't want to stall the main loop so I am investigating spinning off a thread each time a request to write or read a file is generated.
I've tried many things including using the async keyword which sounds promising. I boiled down some code to a simple example:
#include <future>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
bool write_file(const std::string filename)
{
std::cout << "write_file: filename is " << filename << std::endl;
std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::milliseconds(2000));
std::cout << "write_file: written" << std::endl;
return true;
}
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
const std::string filename = "foo.txt";
auto write = std::async(std::launch::async, write_file, filename);
while (true)
{
std::cout << "working..." << std::endl;
std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::milliseconds(100));
std::cout << "write result is " << write.get() << std::endl;
}
}
I'm struggling to understand the basics but my expectation would be that this code would constantly print "working..." and interspersed in the output would be the write_file start and end messages. Instead, I see that the write_file thread seems to block the main loop output until the timer expires.
I realize I need to also consider mutex/locking on the code to actually write the file but I would like to understand this bit first.
Thank you if you can point me in the right direction.
Molly.

Answer 1

write.get() will wait for the async task to finish. You want to use wait_for() instead:
do {
std::cout << "working...\n";
} while(write.wait_for(std::chrono::milliseconds(100)) != std::future_status::ready);
std::cout << "write result is " << write.get() << "\n";