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  • How can I make a lock free queue without OS support, ESP32?
  • I'd ask your friendly neighborhood LLM for design advice, but off the top of my head, so long as `static_assert(std::atomic<whatever>::is_lock_free)` passes, you could build a lock-free SPSC queue with just plain ol' std::atomics and probably liberal use of `alignas()` calls
  • Is this similar to moodycamel’s?
  • I would have thought that std::optional would have been a likely candidate for use with the Pop() method?
  • Whether the allocator calls are "naive" or not depends entirely on the allocator in use. If you need thread/core locality and batching you can get that by replacing global new/delete functions with a decent allocator.
  • Once you use atomic cmpxchg you've lost a great deal of scalability because it implies a retry loop (internal or by the user)

    The last thing you want is all of the threads failing to cmpxchg (spuriously or otherwise ) spinning on a shared cacheline

    Real world alternatives show atomic xchg only solutions scale to hundreds of threads.

    by nly
  • > Real world alternatives show atomic xchg only solutions scale to hundreds of threads

    But notably only with certain workloads

    by adzm
  • Agreed. But you make it sound like the worst case is necessarily fatal. It depends on the use-case. The workable cmpxchg algorithms will make progress on at least one core each round. In a push or pop operation one of the cmpxchg must have succeeded for another to fail. The atomic xchg algorithms that I know of have other undesirable pathologies (e.g. a suspended producer can stall the consumer).
  • Nice article. There a few issues with your code however from a cursory glance; your dtor seems to allow for spurious/double frees due to custom deleter support (you wanna check up on that), you also seem to use seq_cst far too much even if not needed (you want to avoid them is queues as much as possible), lastly class FastQueueNodeSlot.. isn't aligned (plus 64b alignment is only a thing for amd64 cpus, apple silicon is larger).
  • a C++ experienced programmer, I spoke recently to, told me that using new and delete is basically prohibited nowadays in C++ in favour of std::make_unique, std::make_shared etc.
  • Not trying to be critical, but there are a number of misspellings and grammatical issues and it was actually a breath of fresh air to be reminded while I was reading that a real human being wrote this. I feel a little inspired to turn off spell check for my own writing.
  • Strong "oll korrect" vibes.
  • > NOTE: Throughout our implementation we strictly use compare_exchange_strong, but the C++ standard suggests that for some systems like ARM it mighe be a better idea to run a loop with compare_exchange_weak for better performance. The problem with that is a compare_exchange_weak call may fail spuriously, which essentially it can randomly fail even if everything is correct, thus it makes code code a bit more complicated, so I avoided it for this implementation.

    The reason using `compare_exchange_weak` is a better idea for lock-free algorithms is that, in most cases, you'll run it in a retry loop anyway. Since `compare_exchange_strong` is compiled to a retry loop, if you do a retry loop of `compare_exchange_strong` you basically have a loop in a loop. Using `compare_exchange_weak` makes things both simpler and more performant.

  • This is overstated in value; on arm systems with LSE it's faster to use that even for weak operations than to use ll/sc. Even if you are limited to ll/sc the compiler may not put your cas-loop body into the ll/sc region as there's limitations on how many and what type of instructions are permitted there.