Why are STLs not thread-safe? 1

[maluk]

I have read in most articles that STL is not thread-safe or should not be used in multi-threading? Why? What are other alternatives or how should one make a thread-safe STL?

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[CodingNovice]

There are safe versions about but they operate slower. The basic rationale was that locking is expensive and if you dont need it why pay for it. Its not hard to write a class with a container member and a critical section to sync access to the container. In general where stl containers must be shared across threads I find a single writer/multiple reader lock works really well similar to the one shown in Richters book.

 

[jstreich]

Boost has thread safe versions.

http://boost.org/

Generally speaking, the STL are just dumb containers, Consider the whole thing a resource and protect it at such.

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[laffis]

If you google 'stl' 'interview', you will get the interview from the originator. He explained the thread-safe issue and why STL is not OO.