Using atomic operations to achieve thread safety
Atomic operations are ones which can be executed on otherwise-unprotected shared data as a single indivisible step, where no other thread will be able to compromise the consistency of either that shared data or the operation itself. In other words, even for operation logic consisting of multiple, compound operations—steps—being atomic means that all those steps will run as an unbreakable whole on the shared data, and multiple threads will not be able to interfere with each other. Most fundamental atomic operations are actually implemented on the hardware level, and rely on specific CPU instructions to ensure atomicity, but some can also be implemented in higher level code with the help of those atomic primitives. Because hardware support is needed for the most fundamental primitives, atomic operations will be limited to simple data types commonly up to a size of a pointer. Support for atomic operations for larger data sizes—double pointers or even more—is hardware-dependent, and Del...