News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on On the lack of progress reports from the Mill project. Parent comment

Re:On the lack of progress reports from the Mill project by h0l0cube on Monday July 26, 2021 @02:10AM (#27956220)
> It was impossible to make singleton in C++ in 200x but atomics was described in literature (even in SICP) and only when patent expired Intel made it everyday tool

I'm curious about what you mean here. Are you taking about an atomic compare and swap operation? I'm sure these have been implemented in processors back as far as the 90s, if not earlier.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:On the lack of progress reports from the Mill project by Woodi on Monday July 26, 2021 @06:05AM (#27957625)
Yep, atomics was implemented earlier but, as far as I know, they was patented and only after patent expired Intel put them in. So, how many years it take to "popularize" atomics ? Ten, 20 years ?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:On the lack of progress reports from the Mill project by h0l0cube on Monday July 26, 2021 @06:38AM (#27957851)
I suppose multi-threading wasn't a huge problem for most applications. But I'm not sure how a mutex could ever be properly implemented in a multithreaded environment without an atomic compare and swap, but they've certainly been a thing for a very long time. In terms of atomics as a assembler intrinsic, I think that only became popular when intrinsics started being supported in C compilers, but I doubt the patent was holding that back - unless you know different?
[ Parent | on HN ]