Thread Safety of basic value types

  • Thread starter Thread starter Etienne Boucher
  • Start date Start date
E

Etienne Boucher

String and all the integer value types smaller or equal to 32bit, as well as
Char and Enum types are marked as thread safe on MSDN. Does that mean I do
not need to protect them?

Etienne Boucher
 
Reading/writing those types is atomic, so you don't need to worry about
that. However things like "someInt++" (which is a read then a write) are not
atomic, and nor is anything involving more than one operation. So you might
need to have some sync code, depending on what your code does.

-Michael
MVP
 
Most of what I need to share directly is a state enum and a couple of
booleans, everything else will be synchronised through queues. Thanks a lot.

Just rhetorically... Would the pre-increment operator have more chance to be
done atomicaly? I read it is faster and preferable if the post-increment
property isn't used, at least in C++. It's what I use in all my for loops
now.

Etienne Boucher
 
Thanks alot too, that's a very good read. I'll make my couple of
cross-thread variables volatile.

Etienne Boucher
 
Just rhetorically... Would the pre-increment operator have more chance to
be
done atomicaly? I read it is faster and preferable if the post-increment
property isn't used, at least in C++. It's what I use in all my for loops
now.
Click to expand...

As Jon Skeet has on his page, writing this kind of code is about eliminating
chance and luck. As far as perf, I doubt there's any difference, since the
JIT will probably fix it all up anyways.

Also, as Jon mentioned, there's more to it than atomicity: use volatile or
likewise (thanks Jon, great page!).

-mike
MVP
 
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