Re: Thread safe, thread-local variable

From:
Ulrich Eckhardt <eckhardt@satorlaser.com>
Newsgroups:
microsoft.public.vc.language
Date:
Thu, 03 May 2007 13:00:56 +0200
Message-ID:
<e0sog4-2do.ln1@satorlaser.homedns.org>
Bart Simpson wrote:

I am writing a class which is an analytic engine that traverses a MxN
matrix space and makes calculations at each point in the matrix. The
calculations involve calling "exposed" functions via callbacks.

In a nutshell, I need to be able to pass the current position in the
grid to the callback function


Typically, callbacks receive a custom void pointer in C environments. For
C++, I'd take a look at Boost.Function.

, so I have somehing like this:

//'global' vars
namespace
{
     Point mypoint ;
}

class MyEngine
{
public:
     void WriteCurrentPointValue();
     //...
};

//"registered" functions
int foo()
{
    Point point = ReadCurrentPointValue();
    return DoSomething(point);
}

However, this soln is not thread safe in that if I have multiple
instances of the engine running in different threads, all bets are off.


Obviously, that is why the context is passed along with the callback
function.

Other than that, if you have an algorithm that walks the matrix and calls
the callback, I would expect the position in the matrix to be passed
directly to the function. Passing function parameters in a thread-local
context is seriously f***ed up, also it doesn't necessarily help: your
callback might recursively invoke a related function.

Uli

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