Who's afraid of a big bad optimizing compiler?

Posted Aug 15, 2019 19:11 UTC (Thu) by PaulMcKenney (✭ supporter ✭, #9624)
In reply to: Who's afraid of a big bad optimizing compiler? by dcoutts
Parent article: Who's afraid of a big bad optimizing compiler?

But both C and C++ do now allow shared variables to be designated as such, for example, using C _Atomic and C++ atomic<T>. Although these are not perfect, they can be quite helpful. Especially given that they allow easy use of lighter-weight and more-scalable synchronization mechanisms than MVars and TVars appear to enable.

The problem is that these C and C++ features were not introduced into either standard until 2011, some decades after both languages were first used to write concurrent code. So there is quite a bit of production code that does not mark shared variables, because there was no way to do so at the time that code was written.

So again, this is a golden opportunity for people who can come up with ways of locating vulnerable concurrent code in large production concurrent C and C++ code bases!