I’m working on a class library and have opted for a route with my design to make implementation and thread safety slightly easier, however I’m wondering if there might be a better approach.
A brief background is that I have a multi-threaded heuristic algorithm within a class library, that once set-up with a scenario should attempt to solve it. However I obviously want it to be thread safe and if someone makes a change to anything while it is solving for that to causes crashes or errors.
The current approach I’ve got is if I have a class A, then I create a number InternalA instances for each A instance. The InternalA has many of the important properties from the A class, but is internal an inaccessible outside the library.
The downside of this, is that if I wish to extend the decision making logic (or actually let someone do this outside the library) then it means I need to change the code within the InternalA (or provide some sort of delegate function).
Does this sound like the right approach?
It’s hard to really say from just that – but I can say that if you can make everything immutable, your life will be a lot easier. Look at how functional languages approach immutable data structures and collections. The less shared mutable data you have, the simple threading will be.