[boost] Re: shared_ptr on ppc?

From: Miro Jurisic (macdev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-04-06 18:50:32

In article <4254643E.E4AE9DAE_at_[hidden]>, Alexander Terekhov <terekhov_at_[hidden]> 
wrote:

> Miro Jurisic wrote:
> 
> [... Apple's lwarc/stwcx smells-like-FUD stuff ...]
> 
> I gather that it's all about "hard to grasp" msync stuff, nothing else.
> 
> regards, alexander.

As I said elsewhere in the thread, I freely admit doubt because I do not have 
insight into all the CPU-specific issues here, but:

1. Apple has an API that works
2. Apple has an API that doesn't depend on the compiler
3. Apple makes an implicit commitment to continue making this API work as new 
hardware is released

Leaving aside the question of what the 1998 CompareAndSwap looked like (because 
that's not what it looks like today), as far as I can tell there is no technical 
reason to believe that the boost code would be better than Apple's, and there is 
a good reason that calling Apple's APIs would make our code easier to maintain 
both in terms of compiler support and in terms of new hardware support. 

Let's not succumb to NIH syndrome here. When a library that boost can depend on 
(OS, STL, ANSI C, etc) provides functionality that we need, as is the case here, 
we should use it.

meeroh