[Insight-developers] itkTimeStamp Test Failures Mistery

[Bradley Lowekamp]

>

Hello,

	This has been a very interesting discussion. I think these  
definitions of reentrant and thread-safe here are important:

> According to QT, the optimized timestamp is thus reentrant but not  
> thread-safe:
> http://doc.trolltech.com/4.4/threads.html#reentrancy-and-thread-safety
> "By extension, a class is said to be reentrant if each and every one
> of its functions can be called simultaneously by multiple threads on
> different instances of the class. Similarly, the class is said to be
> thread-safe if the functions can be called by different threads on the
> same instance."
>

It appears the goal here is to make itkTimeStamp thread-safe. Does any  
of ITK meet this definition? I know there are some parts which should  
be reentrant (itkObjectFactory) but are not.

Why are we trying to get it to be thread-safe? Is this need? Where is  
this need? Does every instance of TimeStamp need to meet this  
requirement?

If only some do, do we need two types of TimeStamp class say:

itkTimeStamp - guaranteed to be only reentrant.
itkThreadSafeTimeStamp - guaranteed to be thread-safe as per the above  
definition

I just wanted to check to see why this test was written the way it was  
and if it was intentionally done so.

Brad

========================================================
Bradley Lowekamp
Lockheed Martin Contractor for
Office of High Performance Computing and Communications
National Library of Medicine
blowekamp at mail.nih.gov


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