Question

I want to write a high performance synchronized generator in C. I want to be able to feed events to it and have multiple threads be able to poll/read asynchronously, such that threads never receive duplicates.

I don’t really know that much about how synchronization is typically done. Can someone give me a high level explanation of one or more techniques that I might be able to use?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The main concept in thread safety is the Mutex (though there is different kind of locks).
It is used to protect your memory from multiple accesses and race conditions.

A good example of its use would be when using a Linked List. You can’t allow two different threads to modify it in the same time. In your example, you could possibly use a linked-list to create a queue, and each thread would consume some data from it.

Obviously there are other synchronization mechanisms, but this one is (by far ?) the most important.

You could have a look at this page (and referenced pages at the bottom) for more implementation details.