Thread-safe static variables without mutexing?

Question

I remember reading that static variables declared inside methods is not thread-safe. (See What about the Meyer\'s singleton? as mentioned by Todd Gardner)

Dog* M         


        

Answer 1

Not sure whether this is what you mean or not, but you can remove the boost dependency on POSIX systems by calling pthread_once instead. I guess you'd have to do something different on Windows, but avoiding that is exactly why boost has a thread library in the first place, and why people pay the price of depending on it.

Doing anything "thread-safely" is inherently bound up with your threads implementation. You have to depend on something, even if it's only the platform-dependent memory model. It is simply not possible in pure C++03 to assume anything at all about threads, which are outside the scope of the language.