[jmm-dev] weakCompareAndSet memory semantics

[David Holmes]

On 23/04/2016 1:24 AM, Andrew Haley wrote:
> On 04/22/2016 02:52 PM, David M. Lloyd wrote:
>> I think it boils down to this: it's likely to be slightly faster in some
>> situations.  If it's not there, someone is going to ask for it, because
>> they will want that slight bump, and it's in both C++ and C.  It seems
>> trivial to implement.  So why *not* have it?
>
> There's also the case where you have a highly-contended counter --
> think profiling -- and you want to increment it, you can't tolerate
> much of a delay.  It's a disaster if that counter goes backwards but
> failing to increment it at a time of high contention is not so bad.
> So you try it once and continue.

Agreed - perfectly valid usecase for weakCAS, and weakCAS has a benefit 
over CAS. But that is not the inner-loop re-fetch versus outer-loop 
re-fetch that I was questioning from Aleksey's original email.

But you are right that we don't say anything about this in the docs so 
not a concern.

Cheers,
David

> Andrew.
>