AMDG Sid Sacek wrote:

In VC++ and GCC a user creates global TLS like this:

VC++ __declspec( thread ) int tls_1;

GCC __thread int tls_2;

But using the boost library

boost::thread_specific_ptr< int > tls_3;

doesn't provide an initialized global variable as one would expect from thread-local-storage. Using tls_3 crashes the program if it's not pre-initialized to some object. The implication is that every time a new thread is created, it needs to first instantiate all global TLS objects.

Am I not understanding the intentions of this class? Is there a proper or intended way of using this class? I couldn't find any example code in the boost archives.

boost::thread_specific_ptr acts as a pointer rather than a value. It will start out as a null pointer in each thread. You can test whether it has been set to something else with if(tls_3.get() != 0) In Christ, Steven Watanabe