From: "headius (Charles Nutter)" <headius@...>
Date: 2013-04-16T13:54:25+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:54317] [CommonRuby - Feature #8259] Atomic attributes accessors


Issue #8259 has been updated by headius (Charles Nutter).


Comparison of two numeric values *should* be consistent and unchanging, or else I feel that various contracts of numbers are being violated. In Java, this is handled by having numeric values be primitives, and therefore all representations of equality are consistent. In Ruby, where some numerics are idempotent and some are not, I think it is reasonable to extend the CAS operation to do a value equality check. So, the contract would be:

* For non-numeric types, CAS checks only reference equality (hardware CAS).
* For numeric types, CAS checks value equality (using reference equality -- hardware CAS -- to ensure nothing has changed while checking value equality).

This is how version 1.1.8 of the atomic gem will work, once I (or someone else) implements value equality CAS for the C ext.
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Feature #8259: Atomic attributes accessors
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/8259#change-38598

Author: funny_falcon (Yura Sokolov)
Status: Open
Priority: Normal
Assignee: 
Category: 
Target version: 


=begin
Motivated by this gist ((<URL:https://gist.github.com/jstorimer/5298581>)) and atomic gem

I propose Class.attr_atomic which will add methods for atomic swap and CAS:

  class MyNode
    attr_accessor :item
    attr_atomic :successor

    def initialize(item, successor)
      @item = item
      @successor = successor
    end
  end
  node = MyNode.new(i, other_node)

  # attr_atomic ensures at least #{attr} reader method exists. May be, it should
  # be sure it does volatile access.
  node.successor

  # #{attr}_cas(old_value, new_value) do CAS: atomic compare and swap
  if node.successor_cas(other_node, new_node)
    print "there were no interleaving with other threads"
  end

  # #{attr}_swap atomically swaps value and returns old value.
  # It ensures that no other thread interleaves getting old value and setting
  # new one by cas (or other primitive if exists, like in Java 8)
  node.successor_swap(new_node)

It will be very simple for MRI cause of GIL, and it will use atomic primitives for
other implementations.

Note: both (({#{attr}_swap})) and (({#{attr}_cas})) should raise an error if instance variable were not explicitly set before.

Example for nonblocking queue: ((<URL:https://gist.github.com/funny-falcon/5370416>))

Something similar should be proposed for Structs. May be override same method as (({Struct.attr_atomic}))

Open question for reader:
should (({attr_atomic :my_attr})) ensure that #my_attr reader method exists?
Should it guarantee that (({#my_attr})) provides 'volatile' access?
May be, (({attr_reader :my_attr})) already ought to provide 'volatile' semantic?
May be, semantic of (({@my_attr})) should have volatile semantic (i doubt for that)?
=end



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