Thread-Specific Storage for C/C++: An Object Behavioral Pattern for Accessing per-Thread State Efficiently

By: D.C. Schmidt, T.H. Harrison, N. Pryce

Summary: Allow multiple threads to use one logically global access point to retrieve thread-specific data without incurring locking overhead for each access.

Pattern: Thread-Specific Storage

Allow multiple threads to use one logically global access point to retrieve thread-specific data without incurring locking overhead for each access.

• Objects implemented with this pattern are often used as a per-thread Singleton [Gamma+95]
• Proxy [Gamma+95] can shield the libraries, frameworks, and applications from the implementation of thread-specific storage provided by OS thread libraries.
• Double-Checked Locking is commonly used by applications that employ Thread-Specific Storage to avoid constraining the order of initialization for thread-specific storage keys.

Url: http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/patterns-ace.html