[jmm-dev] Specifying VarHandle acquire/release without ill effects

Hans Boehm boehm at acm.org
Fri Jun 24 04:45:47 UTC 2016


There is another important difference between C++ relaxed atomics and Java
ordinary variables.  C++ relaxed atomics guarantee that accesses to a
single variable, independent of all other accesses, look sequentually
consistent.  I.e. we promise "cache coherence".  Java does not for ordinary
variables. And that's pretty critical for compiler optimization on the Java
side.  (It also affects fencing on one or two hardware platforms.)


On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 10:48 AM, Martin Buchholz <martinrb at google.com>
wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 4:50 AM, Doug Lea <dl at cs.oswego.edu> wrote:
>
> >
> > But we then discovered that doing this encountered some unsolved
> > research problems. Mainly that the current C/C++ model relies on rules
> > saying that programs with data races have no semantics ... Plus there are
> > a few
> > minor-mismatch snags that do not seem hard to address, including that
> > plain Java variables are a little stronger than plain C/CC variables
> > (for example references cannot be word-torn), but weaker than atomics
> > in relaxed mode (they are not required to be coherent).
> >
>
> My mental model is to map plain old java variables to C++ relaxed atomics,
> except for long and double, which could perhaps be mapped to an array of
> atomic bytes, technically eliminating all data races.  Both C++ and Java
> try to prevent OOTA results, and both succeed in practice, if not in
> theory.
> http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2013/n3710.html
>


More information about the jmm-dev mailing list