Multithreaded programming techniques

If you are going to write multithreaded applications or system applications for the IBM® i operating system, you need to be familiar with several techniques.

The concepts that are described in this section pertain to all programming languages. To determine how each language enables these concepts, refer to the Language topic in the information center for the specific language.

Existing application evaluation
When writing a multithreaded application, you must evaluate all the parts of the application and all the services that the application uses for thread safety.
Synchronization techniques among threads
When you create code that is threadsafe but still benefits from sharing data or resources between threads, the most important aspect of programming becomes the ability to synchronize threads.
One-time initialization and thread safety
At times, you might want to defer the initialization of resources until a thread requires them. However, your application might require that multiple threads use a certain resource, which requires you to initialize the resource only once in a threadsafe way.
Data that is private to a thread
You can use two methods to create data that is private to a thread: thread local storage and thread-specific data.
Function calls that are not threadsafe
Multithreaded application at times requires access to functions or system services that are not threadsafe. There are few completely safe alternatives for calling these functions.
Common multithreaded programming errors
Several programming errors often occur when you write multithreaded applications.

Parent topic: Multithreaded applications

Related reference:

CL commands and thread safety