Skip to content

Change interface of atomic compare and swap

Kenneth Moreland requested to merge kmorel/vtk-m:compare-and-swap-interface into master

The old atomic compare and swap operations (vtkm::AtomicCompareAndSwap and vtkm::exec::AtomicArrayExecutionObject::CompareAndSwap) had an order of arguments that was confusing. The order of the arguments was shared pointer (or index), desired value, expected value. Most people probably assume expected value comes before desired value. And this order conflicts with the order in the std methods, GCC atomics, and Kokkos.

Change the interface of atomic operations to be patterned off the std::atomic_compare_exchange and std::atomic<T>::compare_exchange methods. First, these methods have a more intuitive order of parameters (shared pointer, expected, desired). Second, rather than take a value for the expected and return the actual old value, they take a pointer to the expected value (or reference in AtomicArrayExecutionObject) and modify this value in the case that it does not match the actual value. This makes it harder to mix up the expected and desired parameters. Also, because the methods return a bool indicating whether the value was changed, there is an additional benefit that compare-exchange loops are implemented easier.

For example, consider you want to apply the function MyOp on a sharedValue atomically. With the old interface, you would have to do something like this.

T oldValue;
T newValue;
do
{
  oldValue = *sharedValue;
  newValue = MyOp(oldValue);
} while (vtkm::AtomicCompareAndSwap(sharedValue, newValue, oldValue) != oldValue);

With the new interface, this is simplfied to this.

T oldValue = *sharedValue;
while (!vtkm::AtomicCompareExchange(sharedValue, &oldValue, MyOp(oldValue));

Fixes #567 (closed).

Merge request reports