Re: [boost] Strings and thread safety (was: [lexical_cast] optimization commited to HEAD)

From: Gregory Dai (gregory.dai_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-09-07 20:15:57

On 9/3/06, Jeff Garland <jeff_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> Corrado Zoccolo wrote:
> > Hello,
> > It just occurred to me that the thread safety problems with
> > std::string are caused by the fact that the library is trying to
> > decode the user intention from what methods he calls, instead of
> > letting him declare it, and check at compile time that he is complying
> > with the declared intention.
>
> This may be the resulting reason, but the primary reason is that that the
> C++
> std lib isn't designed to be threadsafe.  Getting back to lexical cast for
> a
> moment, as I think I said somewhere in the thread, string is not your only
> problem std::stringstream is your not thread safe either....so whatever
> gets
> done in this thread we won't be making lexical_cast threadsafe until you
> fix
> iostreams...

I can attest to your statement about std::stringstream, Jeff. We made both a
string w/o reference counting and a stringstream that wraps up the string in
the same way as std::stringstream does to std::string to get around the
thread safety issue we have been discussing here. Perhaps there is more to
std::stringstream in this regard, as I remember you talked about some global
variables in it, but it appeared the issue stopped at replacing it with the
customized stringstream (in addition to replacing std::string).

<snip>

> Jeff
> _______________________________________________
> Unsubscribe & other changes:
> http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost
>
-- 
Thanks,
Greg