maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Kristian Nielsen <knielsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I really do not like hiding the type. If you did not think carefully about the
type of the underlying variable, you _really_ should not be using something as
complex and subtle as an atomic operation.

And I _really_ do not like that we would now have two _different_ ways to do
atomic operations, one for C and one for C++. It is hard enough to learn one
API, having two different ones, that's just stupid.

Seriously. We have so many problems with our existing implementation of
atomics:

 - They are very unclear on the essential aspect of memory barrier
   semantics. They do not provide read-read or write-write barriers.

 - It even confuse the memory barrier semantics - they call something "atomic
   store" when it is really a memory-barrier store (synced/locked store). They
   do not provide any atomic store that does not involve a full memory barrier
   (on platforms where that is possible).

 - The code is _completely_ impossible to read, with all the macro
   hell. Instead of a simple set of inline function definitions for each
   definition, they do macro magic that basically requires running the
   preprocessor to get any idea of what they are actually doing.

 - ...

So, if people really want to spend time on improving my_atomic.h - why on
earth would they waste their effort on something of as little importance as on
whether code says atomic_add() or atomic_add32() ... :-(

 - Kristian.