The Old New Thing

The difference between thread-safety and re-entrancy

June 29, 2004 Jun 29, 2004 06/29/04

Raymond Chen

An operation is "thread-safe" if it can be performed from multiple threads safely, even if the calls happen simultaneously on multiple threads. An operation is re-entrant if it can be performed while the operation is already in progress (perhaps in another context). This is a stronger concept than thread-safety, because the second attempt ...