Talbot, George wrote:
Wow...this is great! I think I may try to code up a wrapper that privately inherits from shared_ptr and just provides the spinlock around the operations, as a proof-of-concept. I'm doing this on Linux on x86 right now (32-bit). Should I use this spinlock implementation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinlock
To be on the safe side, you'll probably need something a bit more elaborate than that: for( int i = 0; i < 4; ++i ) if( atomic_exchange( &spinlock, 1 ) == 0 ) return; // got spinlock // we probably need to yield to the thread holding the lock for( int i = 0; i < 32; ++i ) { if( atomic_exchange( &spinlock, 1 ) == 0 ) return; // got spinlock sched_yield(); } // we might need to yield to a lower-priority thread holding the lock for( ;; ) { if( atomic_exchange( &spinlock, 1 ) == 0 ) return; // got spinlock nanosleep( some-small-value ); } where 4 and 32 are fudge factors. But the simple version will work for a proof of concept. On Linux, it seems easiest to just use pthread_spin_lock/unlock for the prototype.