Re: [RFC] Thread safety in some low-level functions

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Jun 25, 2020, 01:38 UTC
Message-ID: <20200625013851.GA9782@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAHd-oW5jCWeWDcMhLU2Zf96uTtxLehVsM+StDC8LZga282cDjw@mail.gmail.com>

On 2020-06-24 at 22:52:58, Matheus Tavares Bernardino wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 7:29 PM Matheus Tavares Bernardino
> <matheus.bernardino@usp.br> wrote:
> >
> > - Regarding, oid_to_hex(), a patch from 2010 [1] proposed a solution
> > using thread-local storage and pthread_once(). But as Hannes pointed
> > out in this other thread [2] , implementing a Windows equivalence for
> > pthread_once() could be tricky and voluminous. Since this thread dates
> > from 7 years ago, I was wondering if we would be able to implement it
> > nowadays with InitOnceExecuteOnce() [3].
> 
> I forgot to link it before, but here is a commit in libav.git which
> emulates pthread_once():
> https://git.libav.org/?p=libav.git;a=commitdiff;h=b22693b06d1e5d73454a65c203b4d31c1ca5b69a
> 
> The patch is not so big, and if we consider only Vista+, it seems very
> straightforward. I'm not very familiar with Windows, though, and I'm
> not sure if this solution would work for us.

I believe Git for Windows dropped support for Windows XP some time back. Regardless, since pretty much nobody using Windows XP (with the possible exception of ATMs) is getting security support, I'm fine with ignoring it either way. I am also not a Windows person, so others may have more insight.

As for the general idea, I'm mildly in favor of it. While I don't plan to work on the project myself (outside of cleaning up places I'm already working), I'm definitely not opposed to seeing patches come in to improve thread safety.

-- 
brian m. carlson: Houston, Texas, US
OpenPGP: https://keybase.io/bk2204