Is std::string thead-safe with gcc 4.3?

Question

I\'m developing a multithreaded program running on Linux (compiled with G++ 4.3) and if you search around for a bit you find a lot of scary stories about std::string not bei

Answer 1

Threads are not yet part of the standard. But I don't think that any vendor can get away without making std::string thread-safe, nowadays. Note: There are different definitions of "thread-safe" and mine might differ from yours. Of course, it makes little sense to protect a container like std::vector for concurrent access by default even when you don't need it. That would go against the "don't pay for things you don't use" spirit of C++. The user should always be responsible for synchronization if he/she wants to share objects among different threads. The issue here is whether a library component uses and shares some hidden data structures that might lead to data races even if "functions are applied on different objects" from a user's perspective.

The C++0x draft (N2960) contains the section "data race avoidance" which basically says that library components may access shared data that is hidden from the user if and only if it activly avoids possible data races. It sounds like a copy-on-write implementation of std::basic_string must be as safe w.r.t. multi-threading as another implementation where internal data is never shared among different string instances.

I'm not 100% sure about whether libstdc++ takes care of it already. I think it does. To be sure, check out the documentation