Small revisit of C++ message passing (in a threaded program)


The post C/C++ Message Passing from June ’08 is one or the more popular ones, if Google Analytics is to be believed. Not only that, but every one who arrived there by Google search was looking for C++, not C.

Upon re-reading it, it occurs to me that it would be a good candidate for being a lock free structure.  With C++0x, this should be pretty simple to do, using the new atomic template.  For straight C though, I would have to use compiler specific extensions (or inline assembly), so there may be little reason not to make a C++ specific version of the code that is lock free.

I’ve also thought of trying to use C++0x to construct a purely functional data structure library.  In that case, C++0x would be chosen because of the new shared_ptr addition.  I might have to have a post soon exploring that idea a bit further.

So far, I’ve converted this to be a C++ class and to use templates instead of void*s. Otherwise, it still behaves the same and still uses pthread locking directly. Additional versions will be forthcoming. Here is the recent work.

Hopefully it will be of use to some of the searchers. Keep an eye out for future revisions.


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