Re: [boost] boost::shared_ptr<>::compare_and_swap()--AmIinsaneforwanting this?

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-11-10 12:27:34

Talbot, George wrote:

> So that seems like a bit of a useless guarantee--basically any
> structure constructed with shared_ptr can only be read by the same
> thread that's writing to the structure unless all of the pointer
> operations are guarded with a mutex or spinlock, right?

Or an rwlock.

Correct, the guarantee isn't useful for writing lock-free code.

> Ignoring compare-and-swap, have you or anyone else experimented with
> using a spinlock (as you mentioned previously) to remove the above
> restriction?  What would that do to performance and complexity?  Could
> you use a compare-and-swap type of operation to implement read/write
> thread safety?

The atomic operations would look like:

shared_ptr copy( shared_ptr const & p )

    lock spinlock for p
    shared_ptr r = p;
    unlock spinlock for p
    return r

void replace( shared_ptr & p, shared_ptr q )

    lock spinlock for p
    p.swap( q );
    unlock spinlock for p

bool compare_and_swap( shared_ptr & p, shared_ptr const & cmp, shared_ptr 
xchg )

    lock spinlock for p
    bool r = p == cmp;
    if( r ) p.swap( xchg );
    unlock spinlock for p
    return r;

The critical regions are comfortably short, so using a spinlock seems 
justified. One problem is that shared_ptr doesn't have space for a spinlock, 
so we'd need to use a hashed spinlock pool keyed on 'this'. Or it might be 
possible to reuse the pointer as a spinlock, using something like (void*)-1 
as the 'locked' state. I haven't prototyped it, but it seems workable.