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<title>catch3/docs/thread-safety.md, branch v3.9.1</title>
<subtitle>Progmasoft Catch3: an independently maintained C++17 test framework with a parallel runner, property checks, snapshots and structured results.</subtitle>
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<title>v3.9.0</title>
<updated>2025-07-24T20:01:46+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Martin Hořeňovský</name>
</author>
<published>2025-07-24T20:01:46+00:00</published>
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<entry>
<title>Add configuration option to make assertions thread-safe</title>
<updated>2025-07-24T08:10:00+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Martin Hořeňovský</name>
</author>
<published>2025-07-17T20:58:41+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.progmasoft.com/catch3/commit/?id=2a8a8a7210513fc2f6ae5e65986c0f2d730c1537'/>
<id>2a8a8a7210513fc2f6ae5e65986c0f2d730c1537</id>
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All the previous refactoring to make the assertion fast paths
smaller and faster also allows us to implement the fast paths
just with thread-local and atomic variables, without full mutexes.

However, the performance overhead of thread-safe assertions is
still significant for single threaded usage:

|  slowdown |  Debug  | Release |
|-----------|--------:|--------:|
| fast path |   1.04x |   1.43x |
| slow path |   1.16x |   1.22x |

Thus, we don't make the assertions thread-safe by default, and instead
provide a build-time configuration option that the users can set to get
thread-safe assertions.

This commit is functional, but it still needs some follow-up work:
 * We do not need full seq_cst increments for the atomic counters,
   and using weaker ones can be faster.
 * We brute-force updating the reporter-friendly totals from internal
   atomic counters by doing it everywhere. We should properly trace
   where this is needed instead.
 * Message macros (`INFO`, `UNSCOPED_INFO`, `CAPTURE`, etc) are not
   made thread safe in this commit, but they can be made thread safe
   in the future, by building on top of this work.
 * Add more tests, including with thread-sanitizer, and compiled
   examples to the repository. Right now, these changes have been
   compiled with tsan manually, but these tests are not added to CI.

Closes #2948
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All the previous refactoring to make the assertion fast paths
smaller and faster also allows us to implement the fast paths
just with thread-local and atomic variables, without full mutexes.

However, the performance overhead of thread-safe assertions is
still significant for single threaded usage:

|  slowdown |  Debug  | Release |
|-----------|--------:|--------:|
| fast path |   1.04x |   1.43x |
| slow path |   1.16x |   1.22x |

Thus, we don't make the assertions thread-safe by default, and instead
provide a build-time configuration option that the users can set to get
thread-safe assertions.

This commit is functional, but it still needs some follow-up work:
 * We do not need full seq_cst increments for the atomic counters,
   and using weaker ones can be faster.
 * We brute-force updating the reporter-friendly totals from internal
   atomic counters by doing it everywhere. We should properly trace
   where this is needed instead.
 * Message macros (`INFO`, `UNSCOPED_INFO`, `CAPTURE`, etc) are not
   made thread safe in this commit, but they can be made thread safe
   in the future, by building on top of this work.
 * Add more tests, including with thread-sanitizer, and compiled
   examples to the repository. Right now, these changes have been
   compiled with tsan manually, but these tests are not added to CI.

Closes #2948
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