How to use Google test with threads

Question

I have a serial code which I want to test for thread safety. I am using Google testing framework for my unit tests. How can I call those unit tests with multiple threads to test if the functions are safe to be called from multiple threads?

Answer 1

Google Test doesn't have any specific feature to test for thread safety.

You can always roll out your own threads running over your code concurrently and after joining them, check for some data to have a consistent value.

As an example, I have tested a thread-safe queue by running two threads for producer and consumer, where the producer inserts a fixed amount of elements in the queue and the consumer is set to extract the same number of elements. When both threads are done, I check for the queue to be empty, and the consumer to hold the list of elements in the right order.