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c++multithreadingthread-safetynaming-conventionsnaming
Martin Ba
Martin Ba

Reputation: 38841

Naming (general purpose) thread-safe data structures?

I'm looking for a good name to give to data structures that are thread safe / internally synchronized.

The C++ standard uses the term atomic, but atomic has some rather special meaning. Microsoft uses the term Concurrent in their Thread-Safe Collections (or in C++ _concurrent in the Parallel Containers).

What I really would like would be a generic wrapper for (value) types that provides a similar set of operations to what std::atomics do, but with a different name, and some typedefs derived from it. (use case: something like std::atomic for std::string)

Which of the following would you consider useful / not useful and why?

For the string example I gave, maybe a synchronized_string or a concurrent_string would make most sense, or would that clash with any other connotation?

Upvotes: 8

Views: 1485

Answers (2)

Martin Ba
Martin Ba

Reputation: 38841

Useful answer from comment:

Both Microsoft PPL and Intel TBB use concurrent_*. My only suggestion is: Don't use parallel when you mean concurrent. (Parallel is one kind of concurrency, but these data structures should work even on a single processor time-multiplexing multiple threads.) You might also look at the monitor pattern.

-- Wandering Logic Jun 18 at 12:02

To which I might add that from the choices I gave, after thinking some more about it, only concurrent and synchronized seem to make sense.

Upvotes: 8

Yoav R.
Yoav R.

Reputation: 531

I think you should try this name:

SafeContainer

Upvotes: 0

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