What is meant by CoreData is not thread safe?

Question

In Obj-C, what does it mean in simple terms; \"CoreData is not thread safe\"

OR in general what is \"not thread safe\" ?

Answer 1

UPDATE | Please see @bbum's answer. I accept that my answer is flawed and @bbum is correct.

If something is described as "not thread safe", it means that no special precautions have been taken to ensure it won't crash should two separate threads try to use it simultaneously. In general, code that is to be used by more than one thread requires explicit locks (or @synchronize blocks) wrapping around aspects of the code. In particular, any object/variable that will be modified would almost certainly cause a crash if two threads happened to write to it at the same time (since they'd be writing to the same memory address). Similarly, if one thread was reading a variable while another was writing to it, garbage would be returned and the program would likely crash.

Using @synchronized, or NSLock or a POSIX mutex etc, ensures that only one thread can execute a particular block of code at any given time. The other threads get blocked and have to wait until the lock is released. There is a slight performance hit with using locks (and of course some development overhead having to think about them), so often code expressly declares that it is not thread safe, leaving you, the adopter of the code, to place locks as needed yourself (or limit execution of the non thread-safe to a single thread).

See the Apple documentation for more information about threading and thread safety:

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ObjectiveC/Articles/ocThreading.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30001163-CH19-BCIIGGHG