JSjstimpfle·Aug 4, 2026
Serious question, are you an AI programmed to be annoying?
> This isn't a problem with the standard library because a std::dequeue or any other core data structure doesn't make any promises about concurrency.
Dude, I KNOW I need to handle concurrency myself. But I'd contend the point that it isn't a problem with the STL: It is a bug (that I introduced myself) that I had to deal with because of complexity, or rather because non-obvious behaviour, because bullshit boilerplate.
> If you have an underlying data structure that is being used from multiple threads, you can't hold on to raw pointers into the data structure. There is no way for other threads to know that it can't be changed, moved, freed or invalidated.
This is totally irrelevant because if you paid attention, the problem wasn't even threads. It was concurrency, more abstractly. I
Read the rest
terator invalidation based on the "manifested" order of execution.
But anyway, you want to jump to reference counting. I'd say you can absolutely hold on to raw pointers from multiple threads, it entirely depends on what you do. If the threads have unpredictable lifetimes, then yes, some form of reference counting is indicated.
But when you know that isn't the case, then it isn't the case and you probably don't need reference counting.
> I hope it isn't lost on you that the reference counting approach is much easier to do with a destructor, since the reference count can be incremented before it is given to you from the API and decremented automatically when it goes out of scope.
Except when you're passing around stuff and have to duplicate or move references, and have to use APIs that receive pre-incremented or un-incremented pointers. In some cases your data structures might even be so messy that you end up with cycles.
I have my scars from making my own COM pointer classes with copy and move semantics, and also from using "official" COM pointer classes. After a couple of iterations I've decided to cut all the boilerplate and C++ ceremony that doesn't do anything, and get rid of ugly method wrappers that are a pain to step through in the debugger, and stopped clinging to a cargo cult which simply leaves you with harder to detect bugs.
You heard right, I'm back to completely manual reference counting (and only counting where I _have_ to), somehow the code is much shorter and easily understandable, I got back control over what happens. Have been able to keep atomic ops at a minimum, with RAII superfluous ops can happen easily. (Remember Chromium's 25000 copies per keystroke bug?) And there has only been a single instance where I introduced a leak, that was immediately pointed out by the D3D11 debug layer. I'm doing this approach for my second project already and have found it to work great.
There is no solution except good understanding of what you do, and good code structure that expresses this understanding. Generic "RAII" type understanding is rarely helpful IMO, you give up control and sometimes end up throwing hands in the AIIR and hope it will not break.
> https://github.com/cameron314/concurrentqueue
Thanks for the pointers to what is probably 5K lines of C++ boilerplate. But I have written half a dozen concurrent queues myself, locking and lock-free ones. Some in less than a hundred lines. Also one in ~2K lines, that was for a longer-term project where the queue needs to safely persist to disk every couple of milliseconds, while ingesting millions of messages per second and billions of bytes per second (was hitting the ~2GB/s that I could get out of my flash drive).
If you want an approachable source that leaves out the fluff, I'd recommend 1024cores by Dmitry Vyukov (only issue is formatting).