loufoque wrote:
Mateusz Loskot wrote :
Today, my friend was told (warned) on the #c++ IRC channel that Boost uses some technologies already patented by IBM (and may be other entities), like RCU or SMR (and may be more).
I think I saw part of that discussion. It actually started about the cost of reference counting in multithreading environments. Then it was said that using technologies such as RCU and SMR could improve performance, but given that those are patented [1], they couldn't be used in boost::shared_ptr.
I do not know how this discussion transformed into patents being used in boost though.
loufoque, Thank you very much for this summary. I think it's a kind of grapevine, transmitted by me too :-) at least to this list.
Since I don't really know myself how RCU and SMR work, I am unable to give more info but if you're interested you could search for "RCU SMR" in Google groups which seems to bring interesting results in comp.programming.threads and comp.lang.c++.moderated about this kind of stuff.
Yup, I've searched these archives. As some of participants in this thread confirmed, RCU and SMR is not used in Boost, so I'm quite sure that it was a rumour about RCU/SMR issues ;-) Although, what Maciej and others suggested, it doesn't mean Boost is completely free of patented technologies :-( Cheers -- Mateusz Loskot http://mateusz.loskot.net