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Thread Safety in Python's dictionary

Asked 2011-08-05T08:16:37.400
153

I have a class which holds a dictionary

class OrderBook:
    orders = {'Restaurant1': None,
              'Restaurant2': None,
              'Restaurant3': None,
              'Restaurant4': None}

    @staticmethod
    def addOrder(restaurant_name, orders):
        OrderBook.orders[restaurant_name] = orders

And I am running 4 threads (one for each restaurant) that call the method OrderBook.addOrder. Here is the function ran by each thread:

def addOrders(restaurant_name):

    #creates orders
    ...

    OrderBook.addOrder(restaurant_name, orders)

Is this safe, or do I have to use a lock before calling addOrder?

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1 Answer

42

Yes, built-in types are inherently thread-safe: http://docs.python.org/glossary.html#term-global-interpreter-lock

This simplifies the CPython implementation by making the object model (including critical built-in types such as dict) implicitly safe against concurrent access.

answered 2011-08-05T08:33:41.517

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