Question

I’m working with some code that does this:

var _init = false;

this.init = function(){

    if(_init)
        return;
    else
        _init = true;

    // Do a bunch of stuff here
}

It seems to me that there is a tiny race condition there that I’d like to eliminate. It’s possible for a second instance of the init function to start running before the first instance has gotten around to setting _init to true. Unlikely, but non-zero, yes?

Given that, is there a straightforward way to eliminate this race condition short of something like a Singleton pattern?

Answer 1

javascript is single threaded (ignoring web-workers for the moment) so you should be ok — there should be no race conditions.

I think the “standard” way of doing this, however, would be to use a self-invoking function

(function(){
    // init stuff here, but you don't need to have any of the _init stuff
})() // <-- this causes your function to be invoked immediately