Delphi-PRAXiS - Multithreading is (still) hard!

Multithreading is hard!

No matter how long you deal with it and how good you (think) you are, you will make a mistake. Usually, it will be a problem that will only exhibit itself in a rare circumstances, most probably on a hard-to-reach customer machine. With some (bad) luck it will only appear on Friday afternoons or during your vacation.

That is why I'm always introducing multithreading with the "Don't do it yourself!" motto. Use a standard library! (And by that I mean

OmniThreadLibrary, of course. ;) ) As your code, it too will have bugs. Unlike your code, it has 1000+ users running it in very different environments which means that at least it is tested as much as possible.

There are, nevertheless, bugs that escape detection for a long time. In 2011, for example, I fixed a well-hidden problem in

TOmniBlockingCollection (

"Multithreading is Hard!"). As nasty as that was, it was nothing compared to the bug I found recently!

As it turned out, the implementation of a bounded (fixed-size) multiple-producer multiple-consumer lock-free queue

TOmniBoundedQueue (try saying that in one breath!) was buggy since its inception! As this queue is basis to all OmniThreadLibrary

communication channels it is really surprising that the bug hid from everybody for 9 (yes, nine!) long years.

Read more »[SIZE=-2]--- Published under the

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license[/SIZE]