可重入与线程安全

可重入与线程安全

本文 摘自Qt官方文档

概念

• A thread-safe function can be called simultaneously from multiple threads, even when the invocations use shared data, because all references to the shared data are serialized.
• A reentrant function can also be called simultaneously from multiple threads, but only if each invocation uses its own data.

Hence, a thread-safe function is always reentrant, but a reentrant function is not always thread-safe.

By extension, a class is said to be reentrant if its member functions can be called safely from multiple threads, as long as each thread uses a different instance of the class. The class is thread-safe if its member functions can be called safely from multiple threads, even if all the threads use the same instance of the class.

可重入

C++ classes are often reentrant, simply because they only access their own member data. Any thread can call a member function on an instance of a reentrant class, as long as no other thread can call a member function on the same instance of the class at the same time. For example, the Counter class below is reentrant:

 class Counter
  {
  public:
      Counter() { n = 0; }

      void increment() { ++n; }
      void decrement() { --n; }
      int value() const { return n; }

  private:
      int n;
  };

The class isn’t thread-safe, because if multiple threads try to modify the data member n, the result is undefined. This is because the ++ and – operators aren’t always atomic. Indeed, they usually expand to three machine instructions:

1. Load the variable’s value in a register.
2. Increment or decrement the register’s value.
3. Store the register’s value back into main memory.

If thread A and thread B load the variable’s old value simultaneously, increment their register, and store it back, they end up overwriting each other, and the variable is incremented only once!

线程安全

Clearly, the access must be serialized: Thread A must perform steps 1, 2, 3 without interruption (atomically) before thread B can perform the same steps; or vice versa. An easy way to make the class thread-safe is to protect all access to the data members with a QMutex:

class Counter
  {
  public:
      Counter() { n = 0; }

      void increment() { QMutexLocker locker(&mutex); ++n; }
      void decrement() { QMutexLocker locker(&mutex); --n; }
      int value() const { QMutexLocker locker(&mutex); return n; }

  private:
      mutable QMutex mutex;
      int n;
  };

The QMutexLocker class automatically locks the mutex in its constructor and unlocks it when the destructor is invoked, at the end of the function. Locking the mutex ensures that access from different threads will be serialized. The mutex data member is declared with the mutable qualifier because we need to lock and unlock the mutex in value(), which is a const function.

个人简单概括

我也上网看了很多博客，感觉网上关于这俩的说法都有些矛盾，这里就以Qt官方为准吧。

可重入是针对类的两个实例，像全局变量这样的，会被调用两次因此结果不确定，对于两个实例自己的变量没事。

线程安全是针对的类的一个实例，即即使是私有变量也可能被调两次，这样的需要“be serialized”.