- fail/overwrite/wait on overflow, fail/wait on underflow
is `overwrite' reasonable? and there would be quite a number of options, how to wait: spin, spin-and-yield(), wait for semaphore (it there were a boost.semaphore), wait for condition variable
Yes overwrite is reasonable. Imagine real-time data like the accelerometer/magnetometer of a cell phone. The most recent data can overwrite the oldest because typically the most recent is most important (ie which way is the phone facing *now*) and then maybe some recent history data (to detect gestures), but the oldest data can be thrown away.
ok ... `overwrite' will only reasonably work for the mpmc queue (and there it is more a `node stealing'). the stack implementation has no way to find the oldest element, and the spsc queue (aka ringbuffer) cannot implement it correctly because the produce thread would need to modify the index, which can only be modified from the consumer thread. cheers, tim