Been doing mostly Java and smattering of .NET for last five years and haven't written any significant C or C++ during that time. So have been away from that scene for a while. If I want to write a C or C++ program today that does some multi-threading and is source code portable across Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux/Unix - is PThread a good choice? The C or C++ code won't be doing any GUI, so won't need to worry with any of that. For the Windows platform, I don't want to bring a lot of Unix baggage, though, in terms of unix emulation runtime libraries. Would prefer a PThread API for Windows that is a thin-as-possible wrapper over existing Windows threading APIs. ADDENDUM EDIT: Am leaning toward going with boost:thread - I also want to be able to use C++ try/catch exception handling too. And even though my program will be rather minimal and not particularly OOPish, I like to encapsulate using class and namespace - as opposed to C disembodied functions.