Subj : Re: Lock-free binary trees
To   : comp.programming.threads
From : gottlobfrege
Date : Mon Sep 19 2005 04:23 pm


Joe Seigh wrote:
>
> No locks required for readers, just writers.

I was hoping for something more explicit: reading while writing?  But
just one writer at a time?  That's what I'd assume, but just wanted to
be sure.

>  Skip lists are essentially linked lists and doing lock-free
> linked lists has been around for ages and is fairly well understood.

Exactly why I thought lock-free skip-lists would be doable (and useful
- possibly the only reader and writer lock free associative containers
so far?).  Yet they seem to have only be tackled in the last 2 or 3
years, with improvements still being made.  They do look a bit tricky,
so that may be why it wasn't done sooner.

.