Are primitive data types in c# atomic (thread safe)?

Question

For example, do I need to lock a bool value when multithreading?

Answer 1

Similar Question here

For the definitive answer go to the spec. :)

Partition I, Section 12.6.6 of the CLI spec states: "A conforming CLI shall guarantee that read and write access to properly aligned memory locations no larger than the native word size is atomic when all the write accesses to a location are the same size."

So that confirms that s_Initialized will never be unstable, and that read and writes to primitve types are atomic.

Interlocking creates a memory barrier to prevent the processor from reordering reads and writes. The lock creates the only required barrier in this example.

John.

Essentially, you wont have a "crash" problem from not locking a bool. What you may have is a race condition for the order of which the bool is updated or read. If you want to garuntee that the bool is written to/read from in a specific order, then you'd want to use some sort of locking mechanism.