C++0x Draft and Concurrency Papers in the August 2008 Mailing

Thursday, 28 August 2008

Yesterday, the August 2008 C++ Standards Committee Mailing was published. This features a new Working Draft for C++0x, as well as quite a few other papers.

Thread-local storage

This draft incorporates N2659: Thread-Local Storage, which was voted in at the June committee meeting. This introduces a new keyword: thread_local which can be used to indicate that each thread will have its own copy of an object which would otherwise have static storage duration.

thread_local int global;
thread_local std::string constructors_allowed;

void foo()
{
    struct my_class{};

    static thread_local my_class block_scope_static;
}

As the example above shows, objects with constructors and destructors can be declared thread_local. The constructor is called (or other initialization done) before the first use of such an object by a given thread. If the object is used on a given thread then it is destroyed (and its destructor run) at thread exit. This is a change from most common pre-C++0x implementations, which exclude objects with constructors and destructors.

Additional concurrency papers

This mailing contains several papers related to concurrency and multithreading in C++0x. Some are just rationale or comments, whilst others are proposals which may well therefore be voted into the working draft at the September meeting. The papers are listed in numerical order.

N2731: Proposed Text for Bidirectional Fences

This is a revised version of N2633: Improved support for bidirectional fences, which incorporates naming changes requested by the committee at the June meeting, along with some modifications to the memory model. In particular, read-modify-write operations (such as exchange or fetch_add) that use the memory_order_relaxed ordering can now feature as part of a release sequence, thus increasing the possibilities for using memory_order_relaxed operations in lock-free code. Also, the definition of how fences that use memory_order_seq_cst interact with other memory_order_seq_cst operations has been clarified.

N2744: Comments on Asynchronous Future Value Proposal

This paper is a critique of N2671: An Asynchronous Future Value: Proposed Wording. In short, the suggestions are:

• that shared_future<T>::get() should return by value rather than by const reference;
• that promise objects are copyable;
• and that the promise functions for setting the value and exception be overloaded with versions that return an error code rather than throwing an exception on failure.

N2745: Example POWER Implementation for C/C++ Memory Model

This paper discusses how the C++0x memory model and atomic operations can be implemented on systems based on the POWER architecture. As a consequence, this also shows how the different memory orderings can affect the actual generated code for atomic operations.

N2746: Rationale for the C++ working paper definition of "memory location"

This paper is exactly what it says: a rationale for the definition of "memory location". Basically, it discusses the reasons why every object (even those of type char) is a separate memory location, even though this therefore requires that memory be byte-addressable, and restricts optimizations on some architectures.

N2748: Strong Compare and Exchange

In the current working paper, the atomic compare_exchange functions are allowed to fail "spuriously" even when the value of the object was equal to the comparand. This allows efficient implementation on a wider variety of platforms than otherwise, but also requires almost all uses of compare_exchange to be put in a loop. This paper proposes that instead we provide two variants: compare_exchange_weak and compare_exchange_strong. The weak variant would be the same as the current version, whereas the strong variant would not be allowed to fail spuriously. On architectures which provide the strong variant by default (such as x86) this would remove the need for a loop in some cases.

Posted by Anthony Williams
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Tags: c++0x, concurrency
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