Stefan,

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 2:30 AM, Stefan Strasser <strasser@uni-bremen.de> wrote:
...
 
why would you even need a lock here?
the shared_ptr doc says that you can expect the same thread safety from
shared_ptr as you can from built-in types.
you can use multiple-readers-single-writer without any locks on built-in
types.


You can?  Is assigning to a char or a double guaranteed to be atomic?  How can the compiler guarantee that? -- What if there is some architecture for which it's not a single instruction assignment?

Kevin