If I desire to run a piece of code in a function, only from the second invocation of the function onwards,
Questions:
Is there something wrong to do that?
How can I possibly achieve this ? Is using a static variable to do this a good idea ?
There's two answers to this question, depending on whether you have to deal with multi-threaded serialization or not.
No threading:
void doSomething() {
static bool firstTime = true;
if (firstTime) {
// do code specific to first pass
firstTime = false;
} else {
// do code specific to 2nd+ pass
}
// do any code that is common
}
With threading: I'll write the generic boilerplate, but this code is system specific (requiring some variant of an atomic compareAndSet).
void doSomethingThreadSafe() {
static volatile atomic<int> passState = 0;
do {
if ( passState == 2 ) {
//perform pass 2+ code
break;
} else
if ( passState.compareAndSet(0,1) ) { // if passState==0 set passState=1 return true else return false
//perform pass 1 initialization code
passState = 2;
break;
} else {
//loser in setup collision, delay (wait for init code to finish) then retry
sleep(1);
}
} while(1);
//perform code common to all passes
}