C#: How can I make an IEnumerable<T> thread safe?

c# thread-safety ienumerable
Svish picture Svish · Oct 22, 2009 · Viewed 10.2k times · Source

Say I have this simple method:

public IEnumerable<uint> GetNumbers()
{
    uint n = 0;
    while(n < 100)
        yield return n++;
}

How would you make this thread safe? And by that I mean that you would get that enumerator once, and have multiple threads handle all the numbers without anyone getting duplicates.

I suppose a lock needs to be used somewhere, but where must that lock be for an iterator block to be thread safe? What, in general, do you need to remember if you want a thread safe IEnumerable<T>? Or rather I guess it would be a thread safe IEnumerator<T>...?

Answer

Jon Skeet picture Jon Skeet · Oct 22, 2009

There's an inherent problem in doing so, because IEnumerator<T> has both MoveNext() and Current. You really want a single call such as:

bool TryMoveNext(out T value)

at that point you can atomically move to the next element and get a value. Implementing that and still being able to use yield could be tricky... I'll have a think about it though. I think you'd need to wrap the "non-threadsafe" iterator in a thread-safe one which atomically performed MoveNext() and Current to implement the interface shown above. I don't know how you'd then wrap this interface back into IEnumerator<T> so that you could use it in foreach though...

If you're using .NET 4.0, Parallel Extensions may be able to help you - you'd need to explain more about what you're trying to do though.

This is an interesting topic - I may have to blog about it...

EDIT: I've now blogged about it with two approaches.

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