Launching all threads at exactly the same time in C++

Question

I have Rosbag file which contains messages on various topics, each topic has its own frequency. This data has been captured from a hardware device streaming data, and data from all topics would "reach" at the same time to be used for different algorithms.
I wish to simulate this using the rosbag file(think of it as every topic has associated an array of data) and it is imperative that this data streaming process start at the same time so that the data can be in sync.

I do this via launching different publishers on different threads (I am open to other approaches as well, this was the only one I could think of.), but the threads do not start at the same time, by the time thread 3 starts, thread 1 would be considerably ahead.

How may I achieve this?

Edit - I understand that launching at the exact same time is not possible, but maybe I can get away with a launch extremely close to each other as well. Is there any way to ensure this?

Edit2 - Since the main aim is to get the data stream in Sync, I was wondering about the warmup effect of the thread(suppose a thread1 starts from 3.3GHz and reaches to 4.2GHz by the time thread2 starts at 3.2). Would this have a significant effect (I can always warm them up before starting the publishing process, but I am curious whether it would have a pronounced effect)

TIA

Answer 1

As others have stated in the comments you cannot guarantee threads launch at exactly the same time. To address your overall goal: you're going about solving this problem the wrong way, from a ROS perspective. Instead of manually publishing data and trying to get it in sync, you should be using the rosbag api . This way you can actually guarantee messages have the same timestamp. Note that this doesn't guarantee they will be sent out at the exact same time, because they won't. You can put a message into a bag file directly like this

import rosbag
from std_msgs.msg import Int32, String

bag = rosbag.Bag('test.bag', 'w')

try:
    s = String()
    s.data = 'foo'

    i = Int32()
    i.data = 42

    bag.write('chatter', s)
    bag.write('numbers', i)
finally:
    bag.close()

For more complex types that include a Header field simply edit the header.stamp portion to keep timestamps consistent