You're absolutely correct. So technically, the library is not thread safe. One cannot dynamically load/unload dlls while archives are being save or loaded. So I guess I should say its thread safe except for a small set of specific operations which must be sequenced. I started out looking at various ways of using mutexes. But they all led to the requirement that I link in the threading library and a large slow down in the save/load operations. After much consideration I felt that "aiming lower" was the correct choice in this case. This experience has made me a little wary of the mutex approach to multi-core processing and increased my interest in lock-free data structures. And when I looked into spirit, for the first time in a very long time, it occured to me that spirit might benefit from using a similar approach. If it can't, the usage of spirit for xml input has made the serialization library again dependent on the threading library. I anxiously await more information on this. Robert Ramey Vladimir Prus wrote:
Robert Ramey wrote:
The reason I ask is that the serialization library uses spirit to parse xml archives. Recently, I made changes to make the library thread-safe. I did this without using mutexes/locks by confine all non-const operations to construction and destruction and using static object constructed/destructed at pre-main and post main time time. Although the jury is still out on this, I believe it will make the serialization library thread safe without the need for using threading primitives and libraries.
What happens if one explicitly loads a dynamic library, which uses serialization? I'd guess the types serialized by that library should be added to the global table of serialized type (at least for types marked with BOOST_CLASS_EXPORT), so it's non-const operation done after main. Am I missing something?
- Volodya
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