Subj : Re: [.NET] Volatile Fields [correction]
To   : comp.programming.threads
From : Chris Thomasson
Date : Mon Sep 19 2005 02:20 pm

> (Recently, some people have been promoting the use of lock-free data 
> structures
> for application programming. That's a bad idea,

I am not really promoting the direct use of raw lock-free structures, but 
rather an extremely simple high-level API wrapper around them. I figured out 
how to provide a highly portable lock-free method for tracking references to 
objects. It uses POSIX compiler reorder rules wrt mutexs. Basically, if you 
have a basic working knowledge of POSIX mutexs, you can use the VZOOM 
algorithm on any OS that has them.




> because it requires an
> understanding of memory models that most application programmers don't 
> have.
> Nor would it be an efficient use of those programmers' time to gain 
> sufficient
> understanding to be able to maintain or fix libraries of lock-free 
> structures.

They need to study up on the reader/writer problem. IMHO, hat would not be a 
waste of time.

.