I have a collection of the form:
map<key, list<object> >
I only ever insert at the back of the list and sometimes I read from the entire map (but I never write to the map, except at initialization).
As I understand it, none of the STL containers are thread safe, but I can only really have a maximum of one thread per key. Am I missing anything in assuming I'll be pretty safe with this arrangement?
TBH as long as you put a critical section around any write and read it will work fine.
If the map is never modified at all during the multi-threaded scenario, then you're fine. If each thread looks at its own list, then that's thread-private data, so you're also fine.
Take care not to try and lookup keys with [] because that will insert (modify) if the key doesn't exist in the map yet.
However, I'm curious as to why you'd need this structure - why not keep a pointer/reference or the actual list object itself on the stack of each thread, given that it's private to each thread?
(If it's not, then you need proper synchronisation on the list.)
In fact you say you "read from the entire map" - presumably meaning that any random thread may try to iterate through any of the lists. So you definitely need to synchronise operations on the lists.