Thread safety is a computer programming concept applicable in the context of multi-threaded programs. A piece of code is thread-safe if it only manipulates shared data structures in a manner that guarantees safe execution by multiple threads at the same time. There are various strategies for making thread-safe data structures.
A key challenge in multi-threaded programming, thread safety was not a concern for most application developers until the 1990s when operating systems began to expose multiple threads for code execution. Today, a program may execute code on several threads simultaneously in a shared address space where each of those threads has access to virtually all of the memory of every other thread. Thread safety is a property that allows code to run in multi-threaded environments by re-establishing some of the correspondences between the actual flow of control and the text of the program, by means of synchronization.
Read more about Thread Safety: Levels of Thread Safety, Implementation Approaches, Examples
Famous quotes containing the words thread and/or safety:
“We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.”
—Paul Auster (b. 1947)
“Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the cliché that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)