hi helge, (responding to an old mail after re-reading my latest version of the draft)
well if the atomics are truely atomic, then BOOST_ATOMIC_*_LOCK_FREE == 2 and I find a platform where you cannot use them safely between processes difficult to imagine (not that something like that could not exist)> one would have to do the dispatching logic in the preprocessor, so one cannot dispatch depending on the typedef operator.
it's certainly possible to build a helper template to map types to these macro values (map to the value of BOOST_ATOMIC_INT_LOCK_FREE for all types T with sizeof(T) == sizeof(int) for example)
the preprocessor variables are only defined for integral types. the standard also says: template <class T> bool atomic_is_lock_free(const volatile atomic_type*); The function atomic_is_lock_free (29.6) indicates whether the object is lock- free. In any given program execution, the result of the lock-free query shall be consistent for all pointers of the same type. but atomic_is_lock_free is only defined for integral atomic types. so to be standard compliant, one could build the helper template only for integral atomic types. cheers, tim