std::thread - naming your thread

A portable way to do this is to maintain a map of names, keyed by the thread's ID, obtained from thread::get_id(). Alternatively, as suggested in the comments, you could use a thread_local variable, if you only need to access the name from within the thread.

If you didn't need portability, then you could get the underlying pthread_t from thread::native_handle() and do whatever platform-specific shenanigans you like with that. Be aware that the _np on the thread naming functions means "not posix", so they aren't guaranteed to be available on all pthreads implementations.

An attempt at making a wrapper to deal with many Linuxes as well as Windows. Please edit as needed.

#ifdef _WIN32
#include <windows.h>
const DWORD MS_VC_EXCEPTION=0x406D1388;

#pragma pack(push,8)
typedef struct tagTHREADNAME_INFO
{
   DWORD dwType; // Must be 0x1000.
   LPCSTR szName; // Pointer to name (in user addr space).
   DWORD dwThreadID; // Thread ID (-1=caller thread).
   DWORD dwFlags; // Reserved for future use, must be zero.
} THREADNAME_INFO;
#pragma pack(pop)


void SetThreadName(uint32_t dwThreadID, const char* threadName)
{

  // DWORD dwThreadID = ::GetThreadId( static_cast<HANDLE>( t.native_handle() ) );

   THREADNAME_INFO info;
   info.dwType = 0x1000;
   info.szName = threadName;
   info.dwThreadID = dwThreadID;
   info.dwFlags = 0;

   __try
   {
      RaiseException( MS_VC_EXCEPTION, 0, sizeof(info)/sizeof(ULONG_PTR), (ULONG_PTR*)&info );
   }
   __except(EXCEPTION_EXECUTE_HANDLER)
   {
   }
}
void SetThreadName( const char* threadName)
{
    SetThreadName(GetCurrentThreadId(),threadName);
}

void SetThreadName( std::thread* thread, const char* threadName)
{
    DWORD threadId = ::GetThreadId( static_cast<HANDLE>( thread->native_handle() ) );
    SetThreadName(threadId,threadName);
}

#elif defined(__linux__)
#include <sys/prctl.h>
void SetThreadName( const char* threadName)
{
  prctl(PR_SET_NAME,threadName,0,0,0);
}

#else
void SetThreadName(std::thread* thread, const char* threadName)
{
   auto handle = thread->native_handle();
   pthread_setname_np(handle,threadName);
}
#endif

You can use std::thread::native_handle to get the underlaying implementation defined thread. There is no standard function for that natively.

You can find an example here.