The synchronization primitives offered by POCO are listed as follows:

• Mutex
• FastMutex
• Event
• Condition
• Semaphore
• RWLock

Noticeable here is the FastMutex class. This is generally a non-recursive mutex type, except on Windows, where it is recursive. This means one should generally assume either type to be recursive in the sense that the same mutex can be locked multiple times by the same thread.

One can also use mutexes with the ScopedLock class, which ensures that a mutex which it encapsulates is released at the end of the current scope.

Events are akin to Windows events, except that they are limited to a single process. They form the basis of condition variables in POCO.

POCO condition variables function much in the same way as they do with Pthreads and others, except that they are not subject to spurious wake-ups. Normally condition variables are subject to these random wake-ups for optimization reasons. By not having to deal with explicitly having to check whether its condition was met or not upon a condition variable wait returning less burden is placed on the developer.