Software Engineering Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professionals, academics, and students working within the systems development life cycle. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I have recently switched to TSimpleRWSync from TRTLCriticalSection. The methods BeginRead and BeginWrite confuse me as wherever I read help, they seemingly do the same thing i.e. acquire the critical section whenever it gets relinquished. As the TSimpleRWSync doesn't allow multiple read threads, there is seemingly no point in having two separate methods either.
Is there a special difference between them aside from the contextual one?
The BeginRead/BeginWrite methods come from the IReadWriteSync interface.
TSimpleRWSync is a simple implementation of that interface, allowing access only to a single reader or writer. But there is also another implementation of the interface (TMultiReadExclusiveWriteSynchronizer) which allows multiple concurrent readers.
By having both implementations conform to the same interface, you can easily replace your use of TSimpleRWSync with TMultiReadExclusiveWriteSynchronizer without having to touch all the places where you lock/unlock the critical sections. The only thing you need to do up front is forget that TSimpleRWSync allows only a single reader/writer and write your locking as if there can be multiple readers.
