Re: [Tinycc-devel] [PATCH 3/3] stdatomic: stdatomic.h header

[Elijah Stone]

On Tue, 26 Jan 2021, Kyryl Melekhin wrote:

> Also while atomics are probably better solution so using something like 
> mutex or spinlock, they are platform dependant

They're no more platform-dependent than addition.  Obviously they do need 
support from the CPU, but so does everything else.  They don't depend on 
any OS-specific facilities or anything like that.

> they just kind of produce code smell

How's that?

> so personally I always tried to avoid using them, because portability 
> issues might arrise at some point, especially with new hardware and 
> embeded world.

I think you can generally depend on the existence of atomic operations. 
Embedded platforms are likely to be single-core, so atomicity is 
irrelevant (except for reentrance, but that's a whole other kettle of 
fish).  Elsewhere, atomic operations are necessary to implement many 
algorithms efficiently, and they're part of the specification for many 
programming languages.  So I can't imagine anyone would design a CPU that 
lacked them.

For my part, I have two projects that I would love to use tcc on but can't 
currently because of the lack of atomics.

 -E