Abstract
The most popular programming languages, such as C++ or Java, have libraries and data structures designed to automatically address concurrency hazards in order to run on multiple threads. In particular, this trend has also been adopted in the memory management domain. However, automatic concurrent memory management also comes at a price, leading sometimes to noticeable overhead. In this paper, we experiment with C++ smart pointers and their automatic memory-management technique based on reference counting. More precisely, we study how we can use hardware transactional memory (HTM) to avoid costly and sometimes unnecessary atomic operations. Our results suggest that replacing the systematic counting strategy with HTM could improve application performance in certain scenarios, such as concurrent linked-list traversal.
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- 1.
In C++11 the operation atomic_compare_exchange_weak(p, expected, desired) checks if p has the same value as expected: if so, the value desired is atomically assigned to p; otherwise, expected becomes equal to p.
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Carpen-Amarie, M., Dice, D., Thomas, G., Felber, P. (2016). Transactional Pointers: Experiences with HTM-Based Reference Counting in C++. In: Abdulla, P., Delporte-Gallet, C. (eds) Networked Systems. NETYS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9944. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46140-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46140-3_8
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