Re: Concurrent Containers
On 2010-09-01 21:23:19 -0400, Scott Meyers said:
On 9/1/2010 6:03 PM, Pete Becker wrote:
don't sound like a good idea. Thread safety has to be designed in at the
application level; there's no set of tools that will make a bad design safe.
Clearly.
To you and me, yes. Let's make sure it's clear to all those programmers
who will decide that having support for multi-threaded programs in C++
means it's easy to write them. Rule number 1: most programs should not
be multi-threaded. Rule number 2: most programmers should not be
writing multi-threaded code. Rule number 3: writing fast, robust
multi-threaded code requires careful design and a deep understanding of
multi-threading; having low-level tools doesn't change this. (Or, as
someone in my past put it, a fool with a tool is still a fool)
My impression is that the primary goal of concurrent data structures
isn't thread safety per se, but rather thread safety (for some defined
set of presumably useful operations) that scales well. Locking an
entire data structure to operate on only a part of it does not scale
well.
Well said.
--
Pete
Roundhouse Consulting, Ltd. (www.versatilecoding.com) Author of "The
Standard C++ Library Extensions: a Tutorial and Reference
(www.petebecker.com/tr1book)