Some years ago I found myself wondering if a not supposed thread safe class was being used by multiple threads without being synchronized. In that occasion I wrote about it here Threading mess! and here Threading mess (2)!.
At that time (9 years ago) we had no threads neither atomic in the c++ standard and the solution proposed was based on pthreads and on gcc atomic builtins.
I think it's time to refresh the implementation using some C++11 features.
The idea is very simple, upon entering a critical section (part of code that should not be executed concurrently) we should save the current thread id resetting the stored value as soon the thread leaves the critical section. If a thread tries to enter a critical section but we already have a thread id saved then we have detected the collision.
The technique is very effective and at that time I wrote for the Chromium project the class ThreadCollisionWarner thread_collision_warner.h and thread_collision_warner.cc using the described technique.
Basically what you need to do is to add to your classes a "FakeMutex" and then "locking" it where it's needed as you would do with a real mutex. It's called Fake Mutex because it will not suspend a thread if another one is active but it will assert(false) instead.
If you want to use this technique in your project I suggest to use the implementation done in Chromium.
Examples of uses:
the macros DFAKE_MUTEX, DFAKE_SCOPED_LOCK, DFAKE_SCOPED_RECURSIVE_LOCK and DFAKE_SCOPED_LOCK_THREAD_LOCKED are defined only if compiled in DEBUG mode removing from your production code the atomic overhead.
The modern simplified version of Chromium ThreadCollisionWarner proposed in Threading mess (2)! is reported here.
