Re: [boost] Threads: what I wrote...

From: jpanzer_at_[hidden]
Date: 2000-08-09 16:48:20

Jens Maurer wrote:

> Dietmar Kuehl wrote:
> >   <http://www.dietmar-kuehl.de/threads/>
>
> I've read through the paper.
>
> For avoiding race conditions, it focuses very much on
> mutexes and locks.  However, there seems to be a (growing)
> set of data structures available which do not require any
> locks. For example, a lock-free (yet fully thread-safe)
> single-linked list can be achieved when a few atomic CPU
> instructions are available (only).
>
> While this is probably system specific, I wonder whether
> such atomic operations can be presented in a portable
> interface so as to promote portable implementations of
> lock-free data structures.

Atomic increment and decrement could be really useful
for reference counting.
However, I worry that not all systems could implement such
atomic operations efficiently without some piece of
auxiliary storage.  Is this an unfounded worry?

John