std::string & multithreading

[Marc Glisse]

On Fri, 26 Feb 2010, Radu Marginean wrote:

> Currently std::string cannot be safely used in a multithreaded 
> environment due to features like copy on write and reference counting. 
> Even programs that access two unrelated different string objects in a 
> multicore machine may suffer random crashes.

Is that really the case? Last time I checked, the implementation didn't 
use any global/static variables, so no reason for unrelated strings to 
interact, and the reference counting used atomic operations, which is 
enough to allow for quite a few multithreading scenarios. Now obviously 
that doesn't make operations on strings atomic, but that is seldom needed.

For what precise use did you notice these random crashes?

-- 
Marc Glisse