Advanced Topics in Programming Languages: A Lock-Free Hash Table

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benreesman · 2024-09 · Strong recommendation

For folks interested in this topic I highly recommend this talk by Cliff Click about building highly scalable hash tables via Compare And Swap: [VIDEO]

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qznc · 2013-04 · Strong recommendation

Probably this one: [VIDEO] Anything from Cliff Click is quite good. This guy has a very deep understanding of compilers, virtual-machines, CPUs, and their interactions. A JVM does that? [LINK] Java on a 1000 Cores [LINK]

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benreesman · 2022-08 · Recommendation

It's worth noting that for a lot of people for a long time, Intel TSO was the memory model in practice (which IIRC makes `std::memory_order_seq_cst` pretty much free on Intel). Many clothes have been torn and many teeth gnashed porting C++ from Intel to more relaxed architectures. Back in the day that usually meant like SPARC, today that usually means ARM. "Acquire" and "Release" are relatively comprehensible in isolated examples, but the intuitions don't compose well. It's realllly easy to end up with an ABA type issue or an architecture dependency even with the simplest lock-free primitives like CAS. Combine that with how cheap `std::mutex` is on most platforms and it's just really a last resort, at least on server-class gear. Google engineers have more experience with this than probably anyone, and they've summed it up nicely here: [LINK] . Doing raw atomics isn't quite "roll your own cryptography", but it's clearly in "if you have to ask, don't use it" territory. I've lost count of how many times I've fuzzed something to Mars and back to show it "correct" and not been able to justify it compared to `pthread` when the profiles were in. With that disclaimer, people are going to do it, and so I should probably leave an example of it done well: [VIDEO]

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