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C++ and Beyond 2012: Herb Sutter - atomic Weapons 1 of 2

alexsmail · 71.2K views · 2017-11-06 · 1:21:13

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Overview

Herb Sutter's deep C++ and Beyond 2012 talk on atomics and the C++ memory model, covering why programmers chasing top performance need to understand hardware ordering. This is part one of two.

On Hacker News

HN treats it as the classic go-to for learning atomics and memory ordering, recommended over books.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 5 months · HN mentions 2020–2024

Topics

C, C++, Rust, Go & systems languagesComputer architecture & CPUsSoftware performance & optimization
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atomicsmemory orderingconcurrencyc++herb sutter

What people said

chc4 · 2024-08 · Strong recommendation

"Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It?" is one of the best books about atomics and concurrency, and my #2 recommendation. [LINK] My #1 actually isn't a book at all, but the two "atomic Weapons" talks by Herb Sutter, which are extremely good. [VIDEO] [LINK]

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zevv · 2024-05 · Strong recommendation

Well written article, nice and to the point. Do recommend. Decades ago I declared myself too stupid to use shared memory with threading; I have learned to avoid this whenever possible, or abstract away the memory access under a safe layer as soon as possible. One of the greatest decisions of my career. Memory model semantics is one of the parts of systems programming that is generally poorly understood; I have had long discussions with senior programmers who have spent their careers carelessly threading their code without realizing what is happening under the hood. Not only did some of them not properly understand the acquire/release model, but they were not even aware of its existence. For a more in-depth explanation, I recommend Sutter's excellent talk "Atomic <> weapons": [VIDEO] . It is a two hour lecture, but it will be worth your time.

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NobodyNada · 2023-11 · Strong recommendation

For a more in depth introduction to the topic with a lot of practical code examples, I highly recommend Herb Sutter’s excellent talk: Part 1 [VIDEO] Part 2 [LINK]

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Sources

Video by alexsmail, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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