Boost Shared Pointer: Simultaneous Read Access Across Multiple Threads
- by Nikhil
I have a thread A which allocates memory and assigns it to a shared pointer. Then this thread spawns 3 other threads X, Y and Z and passes a copy of the shared pointer to each. When X, Y and Z go out of scope, the memory is freed. But is there a possibility that 2 threads X, Y go out of scope at the exact same point in time and there is a race condition on reference count so instead of decrementing it by 2, it only gets decremented once. So, now the reference count newer drops to 0, so there is a memory leak. Note that, X, Y and Z are only reading the memory. Not writing or resetting the shared pointer. To cut a long story short, can there be a race condition on the reference count and can that lead to memory leaks?
