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Critical Sections

The standard way of realizing mutual exclusion between threads under Windows NT is using critical sections. The four basic system calls for critical sections are

• InitializeCriticalSection
• InitializeCriticalSection
• EnterCriticalSection
• LeaveCriticalSection

You can implement a simple wrapper class for critical sections in the following manner:

class CCriticalSection {
private:
#ifdef _MT
    CRITICAL_SECTION m_critical_section;
#endif

public:
    CCriticalSection (void) {
#ifdef _MT
        ::InitializeCriticalSection (&m_critical_section);
#endif
    }
    ~CCriticalSection (void) {
#ifdef _MT
        ::DeleteCriticalSection (&m_critical_section);
#endif
    }

    void Enter (void) {
#ifdef _MT
        ::EnterCriticalSection (&m_critical_section);
#endif
    }
    void Leave (void) {
#ifdef _MT
        ::LeaveCriticalSection (&m_critical_section);
#endif
    }
};

If you want to use critical sections exception safe, you should try something like the following guard helper class:

class CCriticalSectionGuard {
private:
    CCriticalSection &m_critical_section;

public:
    CCriticalSectionGuard (CCriticalSection &critical_section):
        m_critical_section (critical_section) {
        m_critical_section.Enter ();
    }
    ~CCriticalSectionGuard (void) {
        m_critical_section.Leave ();
    }
};

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© 2000-2002 GeNeSys mbH & Co. KG
Last revised: 12/14/2000