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Comment by ifdefdebug | Hacker News Reader

That's quite harsh. I guess you verified that there are actually different threads able to access this code before making such a statement? For instance, if I make a single-threaded application in the first place then I don't care about thread-safety at all. Because I am not going to need it.

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The odds of an singleton being called for the first time simultaneously is abysmal. Usually you even call a singleton first in your own initialization code making errors impossible.

I do agree that technically you are correct and you should wear belt and suspenders, especially if it's a library for third-party consumption and labeled as thread-safe... but still... its pretty esoteric, and only used by the author (I assume) who knows its not thread-safe. Locking isn't exactly without its performance implications either and even though that is neglible it feels unecessary if a race condition is de facto near impossible.

Later on in the class I notice they have this:

		public ulong GeneratedBytesCount
		{
			get
			{
				ulong u;
				lock(m_oSyncRoot) { u = m_uGeneratedBytesCount; }
				return u;
			}
		}

...so if you care about thread safety at some point in your class, then you should care about it during it's initialisation.

I have verified that the CryptoRandom class is part of a standalone library with (1) should be thread-safe since it cannot dictate how it will be used by callers; (2) the authors clearly intended this library to be thread-safe (based on "thread-safe" comments in its source code).

And in all likelihood it is thread-safe - but that's due to being lucky - not competent.

The larger issue is that we have a widely-used crypto software which is clearly (1) not designed well; (2) not implemented well.

How much trust one is willing to place into current and future versions by the same author(s) is up to you.

Well, "(1) should be thread-safe since it cannot dictate how it will be used by callers" doesn't hold. For instance most of .NET classes are not thread-safe because thread-safety has a cost. So it's a question of documentation (it's well documented in .NET).

But "(2) the authors clearly intended this library to be thread-safe" means that piece of code is bad. So you have a point here.

To be a little more specific, the class itself is not marked as thread-safe. Only the AddEntropy() and GetRandomBytes() methods are so marked. So it would technically be permissible for any other part of the class to not be thread-safe.

But since it's a singleton, having a non-thread-safe initializer is cutting that distinction a little fine.

Given the discussion expressed in this chain and the fact that this is a reasonably small open source project. How many times could a solution have been submitted to the project for this and other noticed issues in the time it was discussed?

I'm sure the author would be very happy to see a sudden influx of contributions to the project, and we'd all have a better product in the end too.

Seems odd the spirit of open source in this respect tends to be more about pointing out the failures of the author than to collectively improve the actual product.

That's a fair point. If this was on Github I might take that to heart and submit a PR. Since it's hosted on Sourceforge, which I don't have an account on and don't want to given their recent behavior, I'm not going to.

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