Re: Deduplicating atomics written in terms of CAS

[Szabolcs Nagy <nsz@port70.net>]

* Jens Gustedt <jens.gustedt@inria.fr> [2015-05-18 00:23:07 +0200]:
> 
> The advantage of C11's model for atomic is that this a qualifier, and
> then the compiler automatically checks (or ensures) that all accesses
> are atomic. We don't have that luxury, here, but we could get a bit
> closer to it.
> 

the qualifierness of atomic is a bit confusing

differently qualified types had the same alignment and representation
so far and in some cases pointers to differently qualified types are
implicitly convertible (eg assigning char* to const char* is ok).

atomic is special: when the standard says 'qualified or unqualified type'
it does not include _Atomic even though it is called a qualifier.
(atomic is always mentioned explicitly, it can have different representation
and alignment to allow implementation with locks and thus the pointers
cannot be convertible)

annotating everything with _Atomic in musl is problematic because the
atomic bits are publicly visible in pthread types (we could use _Atomic
only when building musl, but i think its usefulness should be demonstrated
with examples etc before doing something that ugly.. having a_load_relaxed
without typesystem help does not sound very useful)