Using immutable collections for thread-safe read-only operations in .NET
September 23, 2015 1 Comment
Sometimes you have a scenario where multiple threads need to read from the same shared collection. We’ve looked at the 4 concurrent, i.e. thread-safe collection types on this blog that are available in the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace. They can be safely used for both concurrent writes and reads.
However, if your threads strictly only need to read from a collection then there’s another option. There are collections in the System.Collections.Immutable namespace that are immutable, i.e. read-only and have been optimisied for concurrent read operations.