Re: [boost] singleton and thread safety

2 Aug 2005

      Jason Hise wrote:
...
Jonathan Turkanis wrote:
...
...
You might want to look at this thread:
http://tinyurl.com/9xe83
Jonathan
That does indeed confirm that function-local statics are not
initialized
in a thread-safe manner on some current popular C++ compilers.  So to
avoid the whole mess regarding the DCLP, the best approach would
probably be eager initialization, before the program enters a
multi-threaded context.  Is initializing from the constructor of a
namespace-scope global enough to ensure this?
I don't think so, since you might want to access singletons from static
initializers in other translation units.

Have you considered using call_once:
http://www.boost.org/doc/html/call_once.html?  It might look like this:

  boost::once_flag  foo_once = BOOST_ONCE_INIT;
  Thing*            t = 0;

  void foo_init()
  {
    t = new Thing;
  }

  void foo()
  {
     boost::call_once(&foo_init, foo_once);
     // Use *t
  }

I'm not sure this will work, so check it with someone else.
...
-Jason
Jonathan