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Intel Threading Building Blocks
book

Intel Threading Building Blocks

by James Reinders
July 2007
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
332 pages
10h 4m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Intel Threading Building Blocks

Safety in the Presence of Concurrency

When code is written in such a way that it cannot be run in parallel without the concurrency causing problems, it is said not to be thread-safe. Even with the abstraction that Threading Building Blocks offers, the concept of thread safety is essential. You need to understand how to build a program that is thread-safe, which essentially means that each function can be invoked by more than one thread at the same time.

Single-threaded programs contain only one flow of control, so their parts need not be reentrant or thread-safe. In multithreaded programs, the same functions and the same resources may be utilized concurrently by several flows of control. Code written for multithreaded programs must therefore be reentrant and thread-safe.

Any function that maintains a persistent state between invocations requires careful writing to ensure it is thread-safe. In general, functions should be written to have no side effects so that concurrent use is not an issue. In cases where global side effects—which might range from setting a single variable to creating or deleting a file—do need to occur, the programmer must be careful to call for mutual exclusion, ensuring that only one thread at a time can execute the code that has the side effect, and that other threads are excluded from that section of code.

Be sure to use thread-safe libraries. All the libraries you use should be reviewed to make sure they are thread-safe. The C++ library has some functions inherited ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596514808Errata Page