MartinHH

During my time at university (relevant classes were in 2013), the C++11 standard was not mentioned at all. What I got to learn in depth were the problems one could face in C++ trying to make things thread-safe, even though a lot of those problems have been dealt with within the new standard. (Addendum: reading this again, I feel I make my university look worse than it was. Most courses were up-to-date, often adopting new standards in their beta phases. But C++ was an exception, certainly due to the fact that it was not a big part of the curriculum anyway.)

For example, I was taught about the problems of making the Singleton-pattern thread-safe: I learnt about “double-checked locking” and then got to read why that might not help¹. But, lo and behold, all that is obsolete in C++11:

“If control enters the declaration concurrently while the variable is being initialized, the concurrent execution shall wait for completion of the initialization.”[^3]

Hence, this simple and lock-free “Meyers-Singleton” is now thread-safe:

static Singleton& getInstance()
{
     static Singleton s;
     return s;
}

I have to admit that this is all common wikipedia knowledge by now - but I’m still testing Jekyll and this was a decent way to test syntax highlighting, footnotes and post-linking without posting total nonsense.