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Using black magic to make a fast circular buffer.
(lo.calho.st)
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The nice thing about circular buffers is that they can be made lock-free by making each pointer only ever modified by one function, ie.
get
modifies thehead
andput
modifies thetail
.The solution in the article modifies both
head
andtail
in theget
function (when subtracting the page size to put the buffer back into the first page) which makes synchronization necessary to avoid races.The author could actually make this implementation lock-free too, by making only the
get
function perform the subtraction on thehead
whilst theput
function performs the subtraction on thetail
.You would then just need a little bit of extra logic when calculating the current size, but then you'd have a lock-free data structure.