Multithreading Bug in Main Thread Code

13 Apr 2012 | One-minute read

Is is possible for code that is only executed in the main thread to behave as through multi-threads were accessing the code? To help answer the question, assume you are a Windows MFC application. That is probably still not clear enough, so lets see some code.

class CMyClass
{
   public:
   CMyClass() { hDone = ::CreateEvent(NULL, TRUE, FALSE, NULL); }
   ~CMyClass() { ::CloseHandle(hDone); }
   void MainThreadFunction()
   {
      ::ResetEvent(hDone);
      ::CreateThread(NULL, 0, ThreadFunc, reinterpret_cast<LPVOID>(hDone), 0, NULL);
      WaitFunction(hDone);
   }
   void WaitFunction(HANDLE hDone)
   {
      //Wait on the handle
   }
};

DWORD ThreadFunc(LPVOID lpThreadParam)
{
   HANDLE hDone = reinterpret_cast&lt;HANDLE&gt;(lpThreadParam);
   Sleep(1000); //Simulate some work
   ::SetEvent(hDone);
}

The class has a single event that is reused each time MainThreadFunction is called. MainThreadFunctioncreates a thread to run ThreadFunc, a thread-safe function, and waits for the thread to complete before returning. Reusing the event in this way is safe, provided that you don’t recursively call CMyClass::MainThreadFunction. If CMyClass::MainThreadFunction is called recursively, the code may hang (I’ll leave it as an exercise to show why, and why the answer is also not definitive). Whether the code recursively calls CMyClass::MainThreadFunction entirely depends on what happens in WaitFunction (and is the source of the bug I uncovered today).

Often, CMyClass::WaitFunction looks something like

void WaitFunction(HANDLE hDone)
{
   WaitForSingleObject(hDone, INFINITE);
}

But suppose you want to process messages while waiting so that your application doesn’t appear to hang, for example, by using MsgWaitForMultipleObjects. Now the potential for disaster should be obvious. If one of those messages calls CMyClass::MainThreadFunction, you have recursively called the function, and whether you hang is just luck of the draw. The lesson of the day is, think very carefully before processing messages while waiting.