Lock-free data structures library (liblfds)

Ross Bencina
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Page last updated 11 May 2006

Growing interest in open source implementations of lock-free and wait-free algorithms has lead to the creation of a working group to create a library of these data structures under a permissive open source license (BSD/MIT style license).

• Roger Dannenberg's overview of the context for this work
• The liblf mailinglist (see bottom of page for subscription details)

liblfds overview

Liblfds will provide implementations of known lock-free datastructures which users can compose into higher level application-level data structures. Initially the focus will be on the simple data structures: queue, stack, list, ringbuffer for which there are one or more well known lock-free algorithms -- providing a library of these which works on the main hardware architectures will be challenging enough to start with... then there are things like Maged Michael's SMR and lock-free memory manager which may also be desirable in a future iteration.

Status

A number of contributors have existing implementations they'd like to contribute. We need to set up a repository to share code (currently a repo at sourceforge is being configured).

Open questions

• Which license? probably BSD or MIT see opensource.org
• Which languages (ASM, C, C++): need to compile a C/C++ pros and cons list perhaps

Background reading