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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.
getmodifies theheadandputmodifies thetail.The solution in the article modifies both
headandtailin thegetfunction (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
getfunction perform the subtraction on theheadwhilst theputfunction 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.