[cpp-threads] Revised Atomic Paper

[Nelson, Clark]

There's an HTML nesting problem in the "Prior Approaches" section, such
that the entire rest of the document is indented a few levels.

This is just a heads-up: in considering this and the memory model
proposal simultaneously, it is obvious to me that we need to define the
term "read-modify-write operation" somewhere in 1.10. I will have some
words for that in this mailing. You might want to delete the phrase "in
the sense of ... in 1.10p7" in the four places it occurs. At the very
least, you should delete the paragraph number from the reference; in the
standard, the granularity of a reference is a section.

Also, I don't think you need to add the parenthesized phrase "(when not
memory_order_relaxed)" in the discussions of various RMW operations. The
definition of "synchronizes with" already distinguishes relaxed
operations from others.

I understand the motivation for defining a global variable to provide
global synchronization. But given that users will in any event have to
modify their programs, and will have to insert the name of a global
variable to get global synchronization, is there any practical benefit
to using one provided by the standard over one provided by the user?

Clark

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cpp-threads-bounces at decadentplace.org.uk 
> [mailto:cpp-threads-bounces at decadentplace.org.uk] On Behalf 
> Of Lawrence Crowl
> Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2007 19:05
> To: C++ threads standardisation; Boehm, Hans
> Subject: [cpp-threads] Revised Atomic Paper
> 
> I plan to submit the attached paper for the post-Toronto mailing.
> The paper consists of edits to N2324.  Those edits have been
> preserved in the HTML, so you can review any changes by simply
> scrolling through.  Think of this paper as a checkpoint to ensure
> that I have caught all the issues.
> 
> The major weaknesses are:
> 
> * The formal wording is missing, but you can see its shape in the
> interface section.
> 
> * The recent discussion on compare-and-swap has not been incorporated
> into the paper.
> 
> * The implementation section is lagging behind.
> 
> I plan to address these weaknesses, and incorporate any comments,
> in time for the pre-Kona mailing.
> 
> -- 
> Lawrence Crowl
>