Lock-free reference counting

  • Authors:
  • David L. Detlefs;Paul A. Martin;Mark Moir;Guy L. Steele, Jr.

  • Affiliations:
  • Sun Microsystem Labs., Burlington, MA;Sun Microsystem Labs., Burlington, MA;Sun Microsystem Labs., Burlington, MA;Sun Microsystem Labs., Burlington, MA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the twentieth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Assuming the existence of garbage collection makes it easier to design implementations of concurrent data structures. However, this assumption limits their applicability. We present a methodology that, for a significant class of data structures, allows designers to first tackle the easier problem of designing a garbage-collection-dependent implementation, and then apply our methodology to achieve a garbage-collection-independent one. Our methodology is based on the well-known reference counting technique, and employs the double compare-and-swap operation.