C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices

12. Know when and how to code for concurrency

Summary

^Thsa^reafe^dly: If your application uses multiple threads or processes, know how to minimize sharing objects where possible (see Item 10) and share the right ones safely.

Discussion

Threading is a huge domain. This Item exists because that domain is important and needs to be explicitly acknowledged, but one Item can’t do it justice and we will only summarize a few essentials; see the References for many more details and techniques. Among the most important issues are to avoid deadlocks, livelocks, and malign race conditions (including corruption due to insufficient locking).

The C++ Standard says not one word about threads. Nevertheless, C++ is routinely and widely used to write solid multithreaded ...