On 26 Jun 08, at 23:50, Kevin Ferguson wrote:
I am not entirely sure as to what exactly a thread is, but seeing as
anything I've ever programmed is light weight, I've never needed to
worry before. And to be honest, such is still the case. This
question is merely to satisfy my personal curiosity on the topic,
and I can't seem to find a satisfactory answer through google.
Up until now, I just figured that something that wasn't thread safe
would just crash if one attempted to access it from more than 1
thread. (Or it'd just give you some unexpected results) Recently,
however, I read something that seemed to indicate that trying to
thread a non thread safe class/method could lead to slightly worse
problems than a crash. (The article in question mentioned 'damage
your computer')
The author of the article in question is either using hyperbole badly,
or is smoking something. Improper threading hygiene will usually cause
a crash if you're lucky, and silent data corruption if you're unlucky.
This corruption should be limited to your application's data, though,
and it certainly won't "damage your computer" in any way!
So, when something is 'not thread safe', what exactly does it mean?
In most environments, it simply means that it cannot be shared between
threads. AppKit is a bit different, though - it has a concept of a
"main thread", which appears to be at least partially enforced at an
operating-system level. As such, anything you see which isn't marked
as thread-safe in Cocoa shouldn't be accessed from outside the main
thread.
In addition, if one tries to thread a non thread safe class, what
can the expected results be?
Unexpected results? :)
Could be anything, really, within certain bounds. See above.
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