ThreadSafeCollections-FP v0.8.4 Release Notes

Documentation home · Current changelog

Historical release snapshot. This document records v0.8.4 and may contain older APIs, measurements, toolchains, or support statements. Use the current documentation for the present checkout.

Audience: users researching the v0.8.4 release and project maintainers.

Release Date: 2026-07-16

Overview#

Version 0.8.4 is a correctness and POSIX portability release. It resolves the known behavioral caveats documented in v0.8.3: descending sorted-list lookup now follows the active sort direction, Dictionary and HashSet collection bulk operations no longer nest locks on their source, and Dictionary key and value lookup now use type-aware equality.

This release also repairs the relative documentation links that were broken when release and maintenance documents moved into docs/ for v0.8.3.

Correctness Fixes#

Direction-aware sorted-list lookup#

TThreadSafeList now stores both whether it is sorted and which direction is active.

• IndexOf and Contains use O(log n) binary search after ascending or descending Sort.
• Duplicate lookup returns the first matching index in either direction.
• Add, AddRange, and Replace preserve the sorted flag only when new values respect the

active direction.

Portable collection bulk operations#

The following collection overloads now obtain a source snapshot by calling ToArray, release the source lock, and then mutate the destination:

• TThreadSafeDictionary.AddRange(ADictionary)
• TThreadSafeHashSet.AddRange(Collection)
• TThreadSafeHashSet.RemoveRange(Collection)

The previous implementation manually locked the source and then called public source methods that acquired the same lock again. Because TCriticalSection is non-reentrant on POSIX, that could deadlock. The snapshot-first implementation is portable and also makes self-source operations safe.

Type-aware Dictionary key and value equality#

TThreadSafeDictionary.ContainsValue now compares values with Generics.Defaults.TEqualityComparer<TValue>.Default. This replaces raw CompareByte equality, which compared the pointer fields of managed types and could fail for equal strings stored in different allocations.

Default key equality now uses the corresponding TEqualityComparer<TKey>.Default implementation as well. Custom key equality functions still take precedence. This fixes lookup, containment, and removal when an equal managed key is supplied from a different allocation.

Documentation Link Repairs#

Corrected relative links in:

• the root README;
• the v0.8.0 through v0.8.3 release notes;
• the maintainability guide;
• links to source files, tests, the changelog, the cheat sheet, and the generator script.

Compatibility#

Version 0.8.4 introduces no breaking public API changes. Existing v0.8.3 code should compile without modification. ContainsValue now follows semantic default equality instead of the old bytewise behavior.

Validation#

The release is built with Free Pascal 3.2.2 for Win64 and validated with the FPCUnit test runner:

Regression coverage includes descending sorted lookup, managed-string key/value equality, and self-source bulk operations.

The Lazarus package also compiles successfully as ThreadSafeCollections 0.8.4.

See LatestTestOutput.md for the final test summary.

Upgrading from v0.8.3#

Replace the source files and rebuild the Lazarus package. No application code changes are required.

If your application worked around the old bulk-operation locking caveat by creating arrays before calling AddRange or RemoveRange, that workaround remains valid but is no longer necessary.

Resources#

• Repository: https://github.com/ikelaiah/threadsafecollections-fp
• Full Changelog: CHANGELOG.md
• Generated Cheat Sheet: ../start/cheat-sheet.md
• Issues: https://github.com/ikelaiah/threadsafecollections-fp/issues