Thread Safety - Implementation Approaches

Implementation Approaches

There are a several approaches for avoiding race conditions to achieve thread safety. The first class of approaches focuses on avoiding shared state, and includes:

Re-entrancy

Writing code in such a way that it can be partially executed by a thread, reexecuted by the same thread or simultaneously executed by another thread and still correctly complete the original execution. This requires the saving of state information in variables local to each execution, usually on a stack, instead of in static or global variables or other non-local state. All non-local state must be accessed through atomic operations and the data-structures must also be reentrant.

Thread-local storage

Variables are localized so that each thread has its own private copy. These variables retain their values across subroutine and other code boundaries, and are thread-safe since they are local to each thread, even though the code which accesses them might be executed simultaneously by another thread.

The second class of approaches are synchronization-related, and are used in situations where shared state cannot be avoided:

Mutual exclusion

Access to shared data is serialized using mechanisms that ensure only one thread reads or writes to the shared data at any time. Incorporation of mutal exclusion needs to be well thought out, since improper usage can lead to side-effects like deadlocks, livelocks and resource starvation.

Atomic operations

Shared data are accessed by using atomic operations which cannot be interrupted by other threads. This usually requires using special machine language instructions, which might be available in a runtime library. Since the operations are atomic, the shared data are always kept in a valid state, no matter how other threads access it. Atomic operations form the basis of many thread locking mechanisms, and are used to implement mutual exclusion primitives.

Immutable objects

The state of an object cannot be changed after construction. This implies that only read-only data is shared and inherent thread safety. Mutable (non-const) operations can then be implemented in such a way that they create new objects instead of modifying existing ones. This approach is used by the string implementations in Java, C# and python.