Creating a blocking Queue in .NET?

That looks very unsafe (very little synchronization); how about something like:

class SizeQueue<T>
{
    private readonly Queue<T> queue = new Queue<T>();
    private readonly int maxSize;
    public SizeQueue(int maxSize) { this.maxSize = maxSize; }

    public void Enqueue(T item)
    {
        lock (queue)
        {
            while (queue.Count >= maxSize)
            {
                Monitor.Wait(queue);
            }
            queue.Enqueue(item);
            if (queue.Count == 1)
            {
                // wake up any blocked dequeue
                Monitor.PulseAll(queue);
            }
        }
    }
    public T Dequeue()
    {
        lock (queue)
        {
            while (queue.Count == 0)
            {
                Monitor.Wait(queue);
            }
            T item = queue.Dequeue();
            if (queue.Count == maxSize - 1)
            {
                // wake up any blocked enqueue
                Monitor.PulseAll(queue);
            }
            return item;
        }
    }
}

(edit)

In reality, you’d want a way to close the queue so that readers start exiting cleanly – perhaps something like a bool flag – if set, an empty queue just returns (rather than blocking):

bool closing;
public void Close()
{
    lock(queue)
    {
        closing = true;
        Monitor.PulseAll(queue);
    }
}
public bool TryDequeue(out T value)
{
    lock (queue)
    {
        while (queue.Count == 0)
        {
            if (closing)
            {
                value = default(T);
                return false;
            }
            Monitor.Wait(queue);
        }
        value = queue.Dequeue();
        if (queue.Count == maxSize - 1)
        {
            // wake up any blocked enqueue
            Monitor.PulseAll(queue);
        }
        return true;
    }
}

Leave a Comment