Array of Monitors in C#

Question

I'm currently trying to implement the Dining Philosopher problem, however I'm running into an issue. I declare my forks as such

public static fixed Monitor forks[5];

however when I try to reference them via

forks[i].Enter();

I'm only given the possibility of "Equals, GetType, ToString, GetHashCode."

Does anyone know how to create an array of Monitors and lock each specific Monitor?

Answer 1

You just need to create an array of objects - you can't create an instance of Monitor; it's a static class. (I'm surprised you can even declare the array - although it's not clear why you've decided to use fixed sized buffers, either. Stick with safe code, I suggest.)

So:

object[] forks = new object[5];
for (int i = 0; i < forks.Length; i++)
{
    forks[i] = new object();
}

Then you can use:

Monitor.Enter(forks[x]);

to acquire the monitor for the index x.

Answer 2

In C#, you can lock on any object, methods on Monitor are static.

So your code should be done this way:

List<object> locks = new List<object>();
for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) locks.Add(new object());

// ...

Monitor.Enter(locks[0]);