What is the meaning of the term “thread-safe”?

Question

Does it mean that two threads can\'t change the underlying data simultaneously? Or does it mean that the given code segment will run with predictable results when multiple t

Answer 1

Yes and no.

Thread safety is a little bit more than just making sure your shared data is accessed by only one thread at a time. You have to ensure sequential access to shared data, while at the same time avoiding race conditions, deadlocks, livelocks, and resource starvation.

Unpredictable results when multiple threads are running is not a required condition of thread-safe code, but it is often a by-product. For example, you could have a producer-consumer scheme set up with a shared queue, one producer thread, and few consumer threads, and the data flow might be perfectly predictable. If you start to introduce more consumers you'll see more random looking results.