Lock-free programming is an important technique for writing thread-safe code for low-latency and real-time applications. It is also often regarded as challenging and notoriously hard to get right. But it doesn’t always have to be that way! This talk gives an accessible but comprehensive introduction to the subject.

A lot of material has been published on lock-free programming already. However, the modern C++ standard has significantly improved the situation by introducing an inherently thread-safe generic type – std::atomic – and a well-defined memory model for multithreaded code. It is therefore worth approaching the topic of lock-free programming from the perspective of modern standard C++. In fact, all code examples in this talk will be standard-conforming, portable C++11/14, and we won’t discuss platform-specific solutions.

The talk will start by motivating lock-free programming and its use cases. I will then clarify the meaning of terms like atomic, lock-free, and wait-free. Diving into some actual code, we will discuss the usage of std::atomic, its member functions, its template specialisations, compare-exchange operations, and common pitfalls.

In the main part of the talk, I will then show various common use-cases of lock-free programming. We will discuss useful and generic ways to safely share and move data across threads without locks and critical sections. We will also work through the implementation of a lock-free data structure: the lock-free queue (also known as fifo or ring buffer). This will serve as an example of how lock-free structures work, when they’re useful, and what to watch out for.

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