C++ Thread Safe Integer

Question

I have currently created a C++ class for a thread safe integer which simply stores an integer privately and has public get a set functions which use a boost::mutex to ensure tha

Answer 1

For full, general purpose synchronization, as others have already mentioned, the traditional synchronization tools are pretty much required. However, for certain special cases it is possible to take advantage of hardware optimizations. Specifically, most modern CPUs support atomic increment & decrement on integers. The GLib library has pretty good cross-platform support for this. Essentially, the library wraps CPU & compiler specific assembly code for these operations and defaults to mutex protection where they're not available. It's certainly not very general-purpose but if you're only interested in maintaining a counter, this might be sufficient.