Seriously Good Software

Chapter 8. Many cooks in the kitchen: Thread safety

This chapter covers

• Recognizing and avoiding deadlocks and race conditions
• Using explicit locks
• Using lock-free synchronization
• Designing immutable classes

The plan for this chapter is to make your implementation thread-safe. For a class to be thread-safe, multiple threads should be able to interact with the objects of that class with no explicit synchronization. In other words, a thread-safe class takes care of the synchronization issues. The clients can just freely invoke any class method, even simultaneously on the same object, with no adverse effects. The design-by-contract methodology I presented in chapter 5 allows you to precisely characterize what an adverse effect would be: the violation ...