Many readers, one writer - is it possible to avoid locking?

Question

Say you have an in-memory list of strings, and a multi-threaded system, with many readers but just one writer thread.

In general, is it possible to implement this kind o

Answer 1

That is a fairly common request for a threading library to fulfill - that sort of lock is generally just called a "reader-writer lock", or some variation on that theme. I haven't ever needed to use the C# implementation specifically, but there is one: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.threading.readerwriterlockslim.aspx

Of course, you run into the issue that if readers will always be reading, you'll never be able to get the writer in to write. You'll have to handle that yourself, I believe.

(Ok, so it's still technically a "lock", but it's not the C# "lock" construct, it's a more sophisticated object specifically designed for the purpose stated in the question. So I guess whether it's a correct answer depends somewhat on semantics and on why he was asking the question.)