GNU Scientific Library – Reference Manual: Thread-safety

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### 2.12 Thread-safety

The library can be used in multi-threaded programs. All the functions are thread-safe, in the sense that they do not use static variables. Memory is always associated with objects and not with functions. For functions which use workspace objects as temporary storage the workspaces should be allocated on a per-thread basis. For functions which use table objects as read-only memory the tables can be used by multiple threads simultaneously. Table arguments are always declared `const` in function prototypes, to indicate that they may be safely accessed by different threads.

There are a small number of static global variables which are used to control the overall behavior of the library (e.g. whether to use range-checking, the function to call on fatal error, etc). These variables are set directly by the user, so they should be initialized once at program startup and not modified by different threads.