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Re:Show HN: Evenk C++ concurrency library by davidtgoldblatt on Thursday April 23, 2015 @09:41PM (#9430987)
Nice work! I have some suggestions for future improvements:

- Your CPUCycle class doesn't actually do backoff. atomic_thread_fence(m_o_relaxed) is a no-op, and at least one compiler (recent clang versions) will optimize the loop away entirely. You can fix by reading from a volatile variable inside the loop.

- Similarly, nanosleep on linux will busy-loop instead of returning to the scheduler for small delays; this seems not to be the goal for some of the backoff schemes

- The BoundedQueue assumes that a futex call functions as a "full memory fence". I'm not terribly familiar with the linux kernel internals, but I don't believe this to be the case. On Power, for instance, it appears to not always generate a sync instruction, instead using lwsync or isync. I haven't looked at the queue closely enough to tell if this poses a correctness issue, but it definitely looks weaker than atomic_thread_fence(m_o_seq_cst).

- The SpinLock uses a test-and-set loop; test-and-test-and-set will often scale much better because of the reduced cache coherency traffic required.

- Similarly, using NoBackoff as the default backoff strategy seems to impose a likely performance penalty on users who aren't familiar with the need for backoff.

- The FutexLock code looks a little screwy to me. Why backoff if you're likely going to do a futex operation anyway? Why is the Lock()'s unconditional discarding of the exchanged value safe? It seems like you have the potential for missed wakeups. But it's late and I'm tired, so I'm probably just missing something.

I don't mean to be critical, it's just that code reviews only ever contain nits. I'm excited that somebody is working on locking primitives that are more efficient than glibc pthreads (whose performance I'm not a huge fan of).

Re:Show HN: Evenk C++ concurrency library by avdicius on Friday April 24, 2015 @11:29AM (#9434000)
Thank you very much for your review.

- I have a TATAS lock implementation elsewhere: https://github.com/ademakov/MainMemory/blob/master/src/base/...

Could add it to Evenk as well.

- Exchanged value in FutexLock is not discarded, it is used in the conditions of the `if` and `while` statements. In both cases the returned value of 0 means that we've got the lock and the next thing executed will be the `break` statement. If either value of 1 or 2 is returned then we need to proceed with spinning. The `if` condition relies on short-circuiting of || operator, so the exchange is only done if the `value` variable is equal to 1. If it were equal to 0 then the CAS in the for loop would have returned true leading to an early exit.

The idea of using backoff before futex is picked from this article: http://locklessinc.com/articles/mutex_cv_futex/

The author suggests to spin a little in unlock as well, but I didn't go that far.

Re:Show HN: Evenk C++ concurrency library by frozenport on Thursday April 23, 2015 @11:33PM (#9431300)
Would strongly encourage the author to put an example on the front page of the repo. I have no clue what this is, is it like ZMQ, std::thread?
Re:Show HN: Evenk C++ concurrency library by avdicius on Friday April 24, 2015 @01:02AM (#9431510)
Thanks for the advise. The library is currently at a very early stage, so no examples, no docs are available. It is now very tiny, as it grows it will perhaps be a lean alternative to Intel TBB. It uses C++11 standard library atomics and threads where possible.
Re:Show HN: Evenk C++ concurrency library by ngbronson on Thursday April 23, 2015 @11:31PM (#9431292)
One option for compatibility on non-futex platforms is to write your own futex emulation using striped std::mutex or pthread_mutex_t. The emulated futex API still has the same slow-path-only goodness as a real futex, but is fully portable.

For an example of this technique, check out https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/detail/F... . That code only implements wake and wait, but it would be straightforward to extend it to the other futex operations.

Re:Show HN: Evenk C++ concurrency library by mcross on Friday April 24, 2015 @01:33PM (#9434788)
What license are you distributing the code under? I don't see any license noted in your repo.
Re:Show HN: Evenk C++ concurrency library by avdicius on Tuesday April 28, 2015 @05:19PM (#9455230)
I've just added the LICENSE file. It is MIT license.
Re:Show HN: Evenk C++ concurrency library by halayli on Thursday April 23, 2015 @09:22PM (#9430926)
for those interested in C++ based concurrency lib, check out lthread_cpp. It's a wrapper around lthread.

http://lthread-cpp.readthedocs.org

Re:Show HN: Evenk C++ concurrency library by Svenstaro on Thursday April 23, 2015 @09:20PM (#9430923)
Any docs at all?
Re:Show HN: Evenk C++ concurrency library by avdicius on Thursday April 23, 2015 @10:44PM (#9431146)
Not yet, unfortunately.