Is std::ifstream thread-safe & lock-free?

c++ thread-safety ifstream lock-free file-locking
Viet picture Viet · May 2, 2010 · Viewed 9.2k times · Source

I intend to perform opening for reading a single file from many threads using std::ifstream. My concern is if std::ifstream is thread-safe & lock-free?

More details:

  1. I use g++ 4.4 on Ubuntu & Windows XP, 4.0 on Leopard.
  2. Each thread creates its own instance of std::ifstream

Thanks in advance!

Answer

Billy ONeal picture Billy ONeal · May 2, 2010

That is implementation defined. Standard C++ says absolutely nothing about threading, and therefore any assumptions about threads inherently invoke unspecified or implementation defined behavior.

We need the platform you are using to be more specific, but it's probably unreasonable to assume ifstream is either thread safe or lock free. If nothing else, there are probably locks involved in the OS level calls that actually do the reading from the file, in which case no true lock-free implementation is possible. Even without that, each read from an ifstream needs to check several format flags, and needs to update the flags bits depending on what occurs during the read. (i.e. istream::good() and istream::operator bool) Since there is no way all of that can be done atomicly, it's unreasonable to assume much about istream's thread safety characteristics.

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