Question

I was trying to lock a Boolean variable when I encountered the following error :

‘bool’ is not a reference type as required by the lock statement

It seems that only reference types are allowed in lock statements, but I’m not sure I understand why.

Andreas is stating in his comment:

When [a value type] object is passed from one thread to the other, a copy is made, so the threads end up working on 2 different objects, which is safe.

Is it true? Does that mean that when I do the following, I am in fact modifying two different x in the xToTrue and the xToFalse method?

public static class Program {

    public static Boolean x = false;

    [STAThread]
    static void Main(string[] args) {

        var t = new Thread(() => xToTrue());
        t.Start();
        // ...
        xToFalse();
    }

    private static void xToTrue() {
        Program.x = true;
    }

    private static void xToFalse() {
        Program.x = false;
    }
}

(this code alone is clearly useless in its state, it is only for the example)

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P.S: I know about this question on How to properly lock a value type. My question is not related to the how but to the why.

Answer 1

Just a wild guess here…

but if the compiler let you lock on a value type, you would end up locking nothing at all… because each time you passed the value type to the lock, you would be passing a boxed copy of it; a different boxed copy. So the locks would be as if they were entirely different objects. (since, they actually are)

Remember that when you pass a value type for a parameter of type object, it gets boxed (wrapped) into a reference type. This makes it a brand-new object each time this happens.