7

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?

  • SynchronizedThingamajig (or thingamajig_synchronized or synchronized_thingamajig)
  • Concurrent...
  • ThreadSafe...
  • Safe...
  • Parallel...
  • Locked...
  • Mutex ... or Mutexed...
  • Multithreaded...

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?

Community
  • 1
  • 1
Martin Ba
  • 37,187
  • 33
  • 183
  • 337
  • 2
    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 [`monitor`](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitor_(synchronization)). – Wandering Logic Jun 18 '13 at 12:02

2 Answers2

7

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.

Martin Ba
  • 37,187
  • 33
  • 183
  • 337
0

I think you should try this name:

SafeContainer

Yoav R.
  • 531
  • 1
  • 3
  • 15