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.
RCU is a read-write scheme to abuse scheduler. It has nothing to do with boost::shared_ptr. SMR is "poor man" garbage collector (very expensive) for ala-Java ref^^^pointers providing strong thread-safety. It has also nothing to with boost::shared_ptr because it provide basic thread-safety, not strong. regards, alexander.