Austin Bingham wrote:
On 2007-08-22, Howard Hinnant <howard.hinnant@gmail.com> wrote:
I have two answers:
1. This is somewhat of a shocking answer, so please read through the second answer before passing judgement: The proposal purposefully does not mention shared vs exclusive priority. And I would prefer not to.
2. The implementation uses an algorithm which I attribute to Alexander Terekhov.
At the risk of defiling a perfectly good metaphor, I think that if Alexander's algorithm is the car, then other policies are more like light trucks, pontoon boats, and tricycles. That is, the algorithm you describe almost certainly works as suggested, but I may really want something completely different.
No, you don't. The other policies are broken cars, not other vehicles. That said, a POSIX rwlock does grant you the ability to shoot yourself in the foot by using thread priorities. Readers will not be blocked waiting for a pending writer of a lower priority.