Whenever you need to do a quick multithreading program in C++, most of the time printing something out via std::cout::operator<< to validate the logic is the most go-to solution.
Whenever at least two threads call std::cout::operator<< at the same time, then console result will probably be mess, not what we exepct. Newline might not get printed, space sometimes included but other time not included, etc.
Apply full std::mutex seems to be overkill. Anyway mutex solution is not lock-free. What’s about std::atomic? Real close, but it still doesn’t guarantee lock-free solution for us. So those two methods go out of the way.
The sane solution is to use std::atomic_flag. Lower level than std::atomic. It’s comparable to std::atomic<bool> but without load and store operation. See the following code
static std::atomic_flag lock = ATOMIC_FLAG_INIT;
// spin-lock (suitable if short time waiting is known beforehand)
while (lock.test_and_set(std::memory_order_acquire))
;
std::cout << "Print something\n";
// release the lock
lock.clear();Check ThreadLocal.cpp for full example of multiple threads trying to print something out at the same time.
Compile it with g++ -std=c++11 ThreadLocal.cpp -lpthread.
First published on Oct, 16, 2019
Written by Wasin Thonkaew
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