On one hand the advice to always close objects is so common that I would feel foolish to ignore it (e.g. VBScript Out Of Memory Error).
However it would be equally foolish to ignore the wisdom of Eric Lippert, who appears to disagree: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2004/04/28/when-are-you-required-to-set-objects-to-nothing.aspx
I've worked to fix a number of web apps with OOM errors in classic asp. My first (time consuming) task is always to search the code for unclosed objects, and objects not set to nothing.
But I've never been 100% convinced that this has helped. (That said, I have found it hard to pinpoint exactly what DOES help...)
This post by Eric is talking about standalone VBScript files, not classic ASP written in VBScript. See the comments, then Eric's own comment:
Re: ASP -- excellent point, and one that I had not considered. In ASP it is sometimes very difficult to know where you are and what scope you're in.
So from this I can say that everything he wrote isn't relevant for classic ASP i.e. you should always Set everything to Nothing.
As for memory issues, I think that assigning objects (or arrays) to global scope like Session or Application is the main reason for such problems. That's the first thing I would look for and rewrite to hold only single identifider in Session then use database to manage the data.
Basically by setting a COM object to Nothing, you are forcing its terminator to run deterministically, which gives you the opportunity to handle any errors it may raise.
If you don't do it, you can get into a situation like the following:
Your code raises an error
The error isn't handled in your code and therefore ...
other objects instantiated in your code go out of scope, and their terminators run
one of the terminators raises an error
and the error that is propagated is the one from the terminator going out of scope, masking the original error.
I do remember from the dark and distant past that it was specifically recommended to close ADO objects. I'm not sure if this was because of a bug in ADO objects, or simply for the above reason (which applies more generally to any objects that can raise errors in their terminators).
And this recommendation is often repeated, though often without any credible reason. ("While ASP should automatically close and free up all object instantiations, it is always a good idea to explicitly close and free up object references yourself").
It's worth noting that in the article, he's not saying you should never worry about setting objects to nothing - just that it should not be the default behaviour for every object in every script.
Though I do suspect he's a little too quick to dismiss the "I saw this elsewhere" method of coding behaviour, I'm willing to bet that there is a reason Eric didn't consider that has caused this to be passed along as a hard 'n' fast rule - dealing with junior programmers.
When you start looking more closely at the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, you see that at the beginning levels of acquiring a new skill, learners need simple to follow recipes. They do not yet have the knowledge or ability to make the judgement calls Eric qualifies the recommendation with later on.
Think back to when you first started programming. Could you readily judge if you were "set[tting an] expensive objects to Nothing when you are done with them if you are done with them well before they go out of scope"? Did you really know which objects were expensive or when they truly went out of scope?
Thus, most entry level programmers are simply told "always set every object to Nothing when you are done with it" because it is within their grasp to understand and follow. Unfortunately, not many programmers take the time to self-educate, learn, and grow into the higher-level Dreyfus stages where you can use the more nuanced situational approach.
And then we come back to my earlier statement - even the best of us started out at that earlier stage, where we reflexively closed all objects because that was the best we were capable of. We left large bodies of code that people look at now, and project our current competence backwards to the earlier work and assume we did that for reasons we don't understand.
I've got to get going, but I hope to expand this a little futher...
Related
I'm someone who solves problems by looking, not asking. So this is new to me. This has been an issue for years, and it crops up with different computers, networks, versions and completely different code. There is a lot here, so, thank you in advance if you are willing to read the whole thing.
Generally speaking, I write MS Access programs that will open Excel and then create multiple worksheets inside of a workbook using data from Access tables and/or Excel sheets. The process can take a couple of minutes to run and occasionally, it will get an error. I could tell you the error message, but it doesn't matter because it will be different depending where the error occurs. When it occurs I simply click debug and click continue and it... continues. If it errors out again (many loops later), it will happen in the exact same spot.
So, what I start with is to make minor changes to the code. In the current program I'm working on, the error happens when I write to a cell and the value is a value directly from a table. I created a variable, copied the value to the variable and then wrote to the cell. The error moved to a completely different part of the program and it became a "paste" error. Generally what fixes it is to put a wait function at the spot where the error occurs. One second is usually good enough. Sometimes it takes a couple of these, but that usually solves it. It only took one delay per loop this time, so it is working. I just hate causing delays in my program. So... Has anyone seen anything like this before, or is it just me. It feels like a timing issue between Access and Excel since the delays are usually helpful. Thanks in advance.
I dug up my last major Access project that interacted with Word (ca. 2016) where I struggled with similar issues. I see many, many Debug.Print statements (some commented, some still active), but unlike what I recalled earlier in my comments, I don't see any "wait" statements anymore! From what I now recall and after re-inspecting the code, most problems were resolved by
implementing robust error handling and best practices for always closing automation objects (and/or releasing the objects if I wanted the instances to persist)
subscribing to and utilizing appropriate automation object events to detect and handle interaction rather than trying to force everything into serialized work-then-wait code. To do this, I placed all automation code in well-structured classes that declared automation objects WithEvents (in VBA of course) and then defined relevant event handlers for actions I was effecting. I now recall finally being able to avoid weird errors and application hangs, etc.
You also may never get a good answer to a question like this, so despite that I am not an absolute expert on Office development, I have had my own experience with frustrating bugs like this and so I'll share my 2 cents. This may not be satisfying, but after experiencing similar behavior using office automation objects, my general understanding is that interaction between OS processes are not deterministic. Especially since VBA generally has no threading or parallelism concerns, it can be strange to deal with objects that behave in unpredictable ways. The time slices given to each process separately is at the mercy of the OS and it will vary greatly with multiple processors/cores, running processes, memory management, etc. Despite the purpose of the automation objects--to control instances of office apps--the API's are not designed well for inter-application processes.
Although it would be great if old automation code would produces more useful errors, perhaps nested exceptions (like in .Net and other modern environments), something that indicates delays and timeouts within callbacks between automation objects, instead you get hodgepodge of various context errors.
My hardware is old, but still ticking. I often get delays, even if only for a second, when switching between apps, etc. Instead of thinking of it as an error, I just perceive it as a slow machine, just wait and continue. It may be useful to consider these type of random errors as similar delays. If a wait call here or there resolves the issue, however annoying, that may just be the best solution... wait and continue.
Every now and then after debugging these types of issues I would actually discover the underlying problem and be able to fix it. At the least I would be able to avoid actual problems with the data, despite errors being raised, just like you describe. But even when I felt that I understood the problem, the answer was still often to do exactly as you have done and just add a short wait.
I do believe now this is a timing issue. After thinking things through, I realized that I could easily (well 3 hours later) separate the database info from the spreadsheet info and then move the updated code that is causing problems into an Excel Macro. I then called that macro from Access. Not only do the errors go away, but it runs about 4 times faster. It's not surprising, I just hadn't thought of that direction before.
When studying Java I learned that Strings were not safe for storing passwords, since you can't manually clear the memory associated with them (you can't be sure they will eventually be gc'ed, interned strings may never be, and even after gc you can't be sure the physical memory contents were really wiped). Instead, I were to use char arrays, so I can zero-out them after use. I've tried to search for similar practices in other languages and platforms, but so far I couldn't find the relevant info (usually all I see are code examples of passwords stored in strings with no mention of any security issue).
I'm particularly interested in the situation with browsers. I use jQuery a lot, and my usual approach is just the set the value of a password field to an empty string and forget about it:
$(myPasswordField).val("");
But I'm not 100% convinced it is enough. I also have no idea whether or not the strings used for intermediate access are safe (for instance, when I use $.ajax to send the password to the server). As for other languages, usually I see no mention of this issue (another language I'm interested in particular is Python).
I know questions attempting to build lists are controversial, but since this deals with a common security issue that is largely overlooked, IMHO it's worth it. If I'm mistaken, I'd be happy to know just from JavaScript (in browsers) and Python then. I was also unsure whether to ask here, at security.SE or at programmers.SE, but since it involves the actual code to safely perform the task (not a conceptual question) I believe this site is the best option.
Note: in low-level languages, or languages that unambiguously support characters as primitive types, the answer should be obvious (Edit: not really obvious, as #Gabe showed in his answer below). I'm asking for those high level languages in which "everything is an object" or something like that, and also for those that perform automatic string interning behind the scenes (so you may create a security hole without realizing it, even if you're reasonably careful).
Update: according to an answer in a related question, even using char[] in Java is not guaranteed to be bulletproof (or .NET SecureString, for that matter), since the gc might move the array around so its contents might stick in the memory even after clearing (SecureString at least sticks in the same RAM address, guaranteeing clearing, but its consumers/producers might still leave traces).
I guess #NiklasB. is right, even though the vulnerability exists, the likelyhood of an exploit is low and the difficulty to prevent it is high, that might be the reason this issue is mostly ignored. I wish I could find at least some reference of this problem concerning browsers, but googling for it has been fruitless so far (does this scenario at least have a name?).
The .NET solution to this is SecureString.
A SecureString object is similar to a String object in that it has a text value. However, the value of a SecureString object is automatically encrypted, can be modified until your application marks it as read-only, and can be deleted from computer memory by either your application or the .NET Framework garbage collector.
Note that even for low-level languages like C, the answer isn't as obvious as it seems. Modern compilers can determine that you are writing to the string (zeroing it out) but never reading the values you read out, and just optimize away the zeroing. In order to prevent optimizing away the security, Windows provides SecureZeroMemory.
For Python, there's no way to do that that, according to this answer. A possibility would be using lists of characters (as length-1 strings or maybe code units as integers) instead of strings, so you can overwrite that list after use, but that would require every code that touches it to support this format (if even a single one of them creates a string with its contents, it's over).
There is also a mention to a method using ctypes, but the link is broken, so I'm unaware of its contents. This other answer also refers to it, but there's not a lot of detail.
My question will be hard to form, but to start:
I have an MFC SDI app that I have worked on for an embarrassingly long time, that never seemed to fit the Doc/View architecture. I.e. there isn't anything useful in the Doc. It is multi-threaded and I need to do more with threading, etc.
I dream about also porting it to Linux X Windows, but I know nothing about that programming environment as yet. Maybe Mac also.
My question is where to go from here?
I think I would like to convert from MFC Doc/View to straight Win API stuff with message loops and window procedures, etc. But the task seems to be huge.
Does the Linux X Windows environment use a similar kind of message loop, window procedure architecture?
Can I go part way? Like convert a little at a time without rendering my program unusable for long periods of work?
Added later:
My program is a file compare program (sounds simple enough.) So, stating my confusion in a simple way, normally a document can have multiple views, but in this app, I have one view with multiple (two) documents (files). I have a "compare engine" that I first wrote back in the DOS days, that is the heart of the program and the view is just looking at the output of that routine. Sometimes I think that some of my "view" code could make sense in a "document" class but I hardly know where to begin to separate it into more classes. I have recently started reading "Programming Windows" 5th Ed. by Charles Petzold, (I know that is quite out of date (C) 1998) hoping to get a better understanding of direct Windows programming.
I get overwhelmed with the proliferation of options like C#, NET, MFC, MVC, Qt, wxWidgets, etc.
I find I am often stuck trying to understand something going on in the MFC framework because something in my code doesn't work as it seems it should, but the problem is that I don't really understand how MFC is handling things in the background. That is why I am trying to learn "straight Windows programming" where my program has all the message passing code that I write. I hope this helps give enough insight into my question so someone can guide me on my way.
X works enough differently that a raw Windows program and a raw X program probably wouldn't be able to share much UI code at all.
If you want portability between the two, chances are pretty good that you want to use something like Qt or wxWidgets. Of the two, wxWidgets is more similar to MFC, so it would probably require less rewriting, but would maintain (more or less) the same "disconnect" you're seeing between what you want and what it provides.
Without knowing more about your application, and why it doesn't fit well with MFC, it's impossible to guess whether Qt would be a better fit or not. An immediate guess would be "probably not".
MFC uses a "document/view" architecture, where Qt uses the original Model-View-Controller architecture. For the most part, MFC's Document class is equivalent basically a Model and a Controller rolled into one -- so if your Document contains nothing useful, in Qt you'd apparently have both a Model and a Controller, neither of which did much that was useful.
That said, I have to raise a question about why your Document currently doesn't do much. The MVC pattern has proven applicable to a wide variety of problems, so while it's possible it can't work well for your problem, it's also possible that it could work well, and you're simply not using it. Without knowing more about what you're doing, it's impossible to even guess at that though.
Edit: Okay, the clarification helps quite a bit. The first thing to realize is that a Document does not necessarily equate to a file. Quite the contrary, a document can perfectly reasonably relate to an arbitrary number of files.
Just for example, consider a web browser. All the data needed to compose the page its currently displaying would reasonably be part of the same document. Depending on your viewpoint, that's either zero files, or a whole bunch of them (it will start as an arbitrary number of files coming from the server(s), but won't necessarily be stored as files locally at all). Storing any of it as a file locally will be a (more or less) accidental by-product of caching, and mostly unrelated to browsing per se.
In your case, you're presumably reading the two (or three?) files into memory and storing them along with some sort of data structure to hold the result of the comparison. After the comparison is complete, you might or might not discard the contents of the files themselves. I think it's safe to say that the "normal" separation of responsibilities would be for that data and the code that produces that data to be in the Document.
The View should contain only the code to take that result from that data structure, and display it on screen. Nearly the only data you normally want to store in the View would be things related to how the data is presented (e.g., things like a zoom level or current scroll position). Likewise, the code in the view should relate only to displaying the result and reacting to user input, NOT to "creating" the data in the first place.
As such, I think your program could be rewritten to use the Document/View pattern more effectively, or could be rewritten to use MVC. That, in turn, means a port to Qt could/would probably work just fine -- provided you're willing to put some time and effort into understanding how it's intended to work and then make what may be fairly substantial changes to your code to work the way it's designed to.
As I commented previously, wxWidgets is more like MFC in this respect -- it uses a Document and View, not a Model, View, and Controller. It's also going to work best if you do some rewriting to separate responsibilities the way it's designed for. The good point is that it's probably a bit easier to do that one step at a time: rewrite the code in MFC, which which you're already familiar, and then port it to wxWidgets -- but given the similarity between the two, that "Port" will probably be little more than minor editing -- often just changing some names from C* to wx* is just about enough. To my recollection, the only place I've run into much work was in creating menus -- with MFC they're normally handled via resources, but (at least a few years ago when I used it) wxWidgets normally directly exposed the code that created the menu entries.
Porting to Qt would probably be more work -- you pretty much have to learn a new framework, and substantially reorganize your code at the same time. The good point is that when you're done, the result will probably be somewhat cleaner, though given what you're doing, the difference may be pretty minor. In a Document/View, the View displays data, and reacts to user input. In a Model/View/Controller, the View only displays data, but user input (that modifies the underlying data) goes through the Controller. Since you (presumably) don't expect to modify the underlying data, the only user input involved probably belongs in the view in any case (e.g., things like scrolling). It's barely possible you might have a few things you could put in the Document/Model that would be open to change (e.g., things like the current font or colors the user has selected).
What are some ways in which I can write code that is easily modified?
The one I have learned from experience is that I almost always need to write one to throw away. That way I have developed a sense of the domain knowledge and program structure required before coding the actual application.
The general guidelines are offcourse
High cohesion, low coupling
Dont repeat yourself
Recognize design patterns and implement them
Dont recognize design patterns where they are not existing or necassary
Use a coding standard, stick to it
Comment everyting that should be commented, when in doubt : comment
Use unit tests
Write comments and tests before implementation, that way you know exactly what you want to do
And when it goes wrong : refactor, refactor, refactor. With good tests you can be sure nothing breaks
And oh yeah:
read this : http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer
Everything (i think) above and more is in it
I think your emphasis on modifiability is more important than readability. It is not hard to make something easy to read, but the real test of how well it is understood comes when someone else (or you) has to modify it in repsonse to changing requirements.
What I try to do is assume that modifications will be necessary, and if it is not really clear how to do them, leave explicit directions in the code for how to do them.
I assume that I may have to do some educating of the reader of the code to get him or her to know how to modify the code properly. This requires energy on my part, and it requires energy on the part of the person reading the code.
So while I admire the idea of literate programming, that can be easily read and understood, sometimes it is more like math, where the only way to do it is for the reader to buckle down, pay close attention, re-read it a few times, and make sure they understand.
Readability helps a lot: If you do something non-obvious, or you are taking a shortcut, comment. Comments are places where you can go back and refactor if you have time later. Use sensible names for everything, makes it easier to understand what is going on.
Continuous revision will let you move from that first draft to a better one without throwing away (too much) work. Any time you rewrite from scratch you may lose lessons learned. As you code, use refactoring tools to eliminate code representing areas of exploration that are no longer needed, and to make obvious things that were obscure. The first one reduces the amount that you need to maintain; the second reduces the effort per square foot. (Sqft makes about as much sense as lines of code, really.)
Modularize appropriately and enforce encapsulation and separation of logic between your modules. You don't want too many dependencies on any one part of the code or that part becomes inherently harder to understand.
Considering using tried and true methods over cutting edge ones. You give up some functionality for predictability.
Finally, if this is code that people will be using before and after modification, you need(ed) to have an appropriate API insulating your code from theirs. Having a strong API lets you change things behind the scenes without needing to alert all your consumers. I think there's a decent article on Coding Horror about this.
Hang Your Code Out to D.R.Y.
I learned this early when assigned the task of changing the appearance of a web-interface. The code was in C, which I hated, and was compiled to a CGI executable. And, worse, it was built on a library that was abandoned—no updates, no support, and too many man-hours put into its use to change it. On top of the framework was a disorderly web of code, consisting of various form and element builders, custom string implementations, and various other arcane things (for a non-C programmer to commit suicide with).
For each change I made there were several, sometimes many, exceptions to the output HTML. Each one of these exceptions required a small change or improvement in the form builder, thanks to the language there's no inheritance and therefore only functions and structs, and instead of putting the hours in the team instead wrote these exceptions frequently.
In my inexperience I was forced to change the output of each exception, rather than consolidate the changes in an improved form builder. But, trawling through 15,000 lines of code for several hours after ineffective changes would induce code-burn, and a fogginess that took a night's sleep to cure.
Always run your code through the DRY-er.
The easiest way to modify a code is NOT to write code. Write pseudo code not just for algo but how your code should be structured if you are unsure.
Designing while writing code never works...for me :-)
Here is my current experience: I'm working (Java) with a kind of database schema that might often change (fields added/removed, data types modified). My strategy is to parse this schema and to generate the code with apache velocity. The BaseClass generated is never modified by the programmer. Else, a MyClass extends BaseClass is created and the logical components of this class (e.g. toString() ! )are implemented using the 'getters' and the 'setters' of the super class.
Question How can I make sure my application is thread-safe? Are their any common practices, testing methods, things to avoid, things to look for?
Background I'm currently developing a server application that performs a number of background tasks in different threads and communicates with clients using Indy (using another bunch of automatically generated threads for the communication). Since the application should be highly availabe, a program crash is a very bad thing and I want to make sure that the application is thread-safe. No matter what, from time to time I discover a piece of code that throws an exception that never occured before and in most cases I realize that it is some kind of synchronization bug, where I forgot to synchronize my objects properly. Hence my question concerning best practices, testing of thread-safety and things like that.
mghie: Thanks for the answer! I should perhaps be a little bit more precise. Just to be clear, I know about the principles of multithreading, I use synchronization (monitors) throughout my program and I know how to differentiate threading problems from other implementation problems. But nevertheless, I keep forgetting to add proper synchronization from time to time. Just to give an example, I used the RTL sort function in my code. Looked something like
FKeyList.Sort (CompareKeysFunc);
Turns out, that I had to synchronize FKeyList while sorting. It just don't came to my mind when initially writing that simple line of code. It's these thins I wanna talk about. What are the places where one easily forgets to add synchronization code? How do YOU make sure that you added sync code in all important places?
You can't really test for thread-safeness. All you can do is show that your code isn't thread-safe, but if you know how to do that you already know what to do in your program to fix that particular bug. It's the bugs you don't know that are the problem, and how would you write tests for those? Apart from that threading problems are much harder to find than other problems, as the act of debugging can already alter the behaviour of the program. Things will differ from one program run to the next, from one machine to the other. Number of CPUs and CPU cores, number and kind of programs running in parallel, exact order and timing of stuff happening in the program - all of this and much more will have influence on the program behaviour. [I actually wanted to add the phase of the moon and stuff like that to this list, but you get my meaning.]
My advice is to stop seeing this as an implementation problem, and start to look at this as a program design problem. You need to learn and read all that you can find about multi-threading, whether it is written for Delphi or not. In the end you need to understand the underlying principles and apply them properly in your programming. Primitives like critical sections, mutexes, conditions and threads are something the OS provides, and most languages only wrap them in their libraries (this ignores things like green threads as provided by for example Erlang, but it's a good point of view to start out from).
I'd say start with the Wikipedia article on threads and work your way through the linked articles. I have started with the book "Win32 Multithreaded Programming" by Aaron Cohen and Mike Woodring - it is out of print, but maybe you can find something similar.
Edit: Let me briefly follow up on your edited question. All access to data that is not read-only needs to be properly synchronized to be thread-safe, and sorting a list is not a read-only operation. So obviously one would need to add synchronization around all accesses to the list.
But with more and more cores in a system constant locking will limit the amount of work that can be done, so it is a good idea to look for a different way to design your program. One idea is to introduce as much read-only data as possible into your program - locking is no longer necessary, as all access is read-only.
I have found interfaces to be a very valuable aid in designing multi-threaded programs. Interfaces can be implemented to have only methods for read-only access to the internal data, and if you stick to them you can be quite sure that a lot of the potential programming errors do not occur. You can freely share them between threads, and the thread-safe reference counting will make sure that the implementing objects are properly freed when the last reference to them goes out of scope or is assigned another value.
What you do is create objects that descend from TInterfacedObject. They implement one or more interfaces which all provide only read-only access to the internals of the object, but they can also provide public methods that mutate the object state. When you create the object you keep both a variable of the object type and a interface pointer variable. That way lifetime management is easy, because the object will be deleted automatically when an exception occurs. You use the variable pointing to the object to call all methods necessary to properly set up the object. This mutates the internal state, but since this happens only in the active thread there is no potential for conflict. Once the object is properly set up you return the interface pointer to the calling code, and since there is no way to access the object afterwards except by going through the interface pointer you can be sure that only read-only access can be performed. By using this technique you can completely remove the locking inside of the object.
What if you need to change the state of the object? You don't, you create a new one by copying the data from the interface, and mutate the internal state of the new objects afterwards. Finally you return the reference pointer to the new object.
By using this you will only need locking where you get or set such interfaces. It can even be done without locking, by using the atomic interchange functions. See this blog post by Primoz Gabrijelcic for a similar use case where an interface pointer is set.
Simple: don't use shared data. Every time you access shared data you risk running into a problem (if you forget to synchronize access). Even worse, each time you access shared data you risk blocking other threads which will hurt your paralelization.
I know this advice is not always applicable. Still, it doesn't hurt if you try to follow it as much as possible.
EDIT: Longer response to Smasher's comment. Would not fit in a comment :(
You are totally correct. That's why I like to keep a shadow copy of the main data in a readonly thread. I add a versioning to the structure (one 4-aligned DWORD) and increment this version in the (lock-protected) data writer. Data reader would compare global and private version (which can be done without locking) and only if they differr it would lock the structure, duplicate it to a local storage, update the local version and unlock. Then it would access the local copy of the structure. Works great if reading is the primary way to access the structure.
I'll second mghie's advice: thread safety is designed in. Read about it anywhere you can.
For a really low level look at how it is implemented, look for a book on the internals of a real time operating system kernel. A good example is MicroC/OS-II: The Real Time Kernel by Jean J. Labrosse, which contains the complete annotated source code to a working kernel along with discussions of why things are done the way they are.
Edit: In light of the improved question focusing on using a RTL function...
Any object that can be seen by more than one thread is a potential synchronization issue. A thread-safe object would follow a consistent pattern in every method's implementation of locking "enough" of the object's state for the duration of the method, or perhaps, narrowed to just "long enough". It is certainly the case that any read-modify-write sequence to any part of an object's state must be done atomically with respect to other threads.
The art lies in figuring out how to get useful work done without either deadlocking or creating an execution bottleneck.
As for finding such problems, testing won't be any guarantee. A problem that shows up in testing can be fixed. But it is extremely difficult to write either unit tests or regression tests for thread safety... so faced with a body of existing code your likely recourse is constant code review until the practice of thread safety becomes second nature.
As folks have mentioned and I think you know, being certain, in general, that your code is thread safe is impossible (I believe provably impossible but I would have to track down the theorem). Naturally, you want to make things easier than that.
What I try to do is:
Use a known pattern of multithreaded design: A thread pool, the actor model paradigm, the command pattern or some such approach. This way, the syncronization process happens in the same way, in a uniform way, throughout the application.
Limit and concentrate the points of synchronization. Write your code so you need synchronization in as few places as possible and the keep the synchronization code in one or few places in the code.
Write the synchronization code so that the logical relation between the values is clear on both on entering and on exiting the guard. I use lots of asserts for this (your environment may limit this).
Don't ever access shared variables without guards/synchronization. Be very clear what your shared data is. (I've heard there are paradigms for guardless multithreaded programming but that would require even more research).
Write your code as cleanly, clearly and DRY-ly as possible.
My simple answer combined with those answer is:
Create your application/program using
thread safety manner
Avoid using public static variable in
all places
Therefore it usually fall into this habit/practice easily but it needs some time to get used to:
program your logic (not the UI) in functional programming language such as F# or even using Scheme or Haskell. Also functional programming promotes thread safety practice while it also warns us to always code towards purity in functional programming.
If you use F#, there's also clear distinction about using mutable or immutable objects such as variables.
Since method (or simply functions) is a first class citizen in F# and Haskell, then the code you write will also have more disciplined toward less mutable state.
Also using the lazy evaluation style that usually can be found in these functional languages, you can be sure that your program is safe fromside effects, and you'll also realize that if your code needs effects, you have to clearly define it. IF side effects are taken into considerations, then your code will be ready to take advantage of composability within components in your codes and the multicore programming.