14 Jul
2004
14 Jul
'04
2:12 p.m.
Caleb Epstein wrote:
I've been perusing the source code of
and noticed that it uses the class to do reference counting and not (unless BOOST_NO_MEMBER_TEMPLATES or BOOST_MSVC6_MEMBER_TEMPLATES are defined). Can anyone comment on the reasoning behind using a lightweight mutex-protected counter instead of an atomic counter? I'd think that an atomic counter would be faster, but I suspect that there is a good reason for protecting the count with a mutex. This then begs the question of why use the atomic counter in the situations mentioned above?
If you look at shared_count, you'll see it has to keep track of 2 values, strong_count and weak_count, you can't do this with 'atomic count' so therefore it uses lwm. Cheers Russell