C++ High Performance

Lock-free queue example

Here, we are going to show an example of a lock-free queue, which is a relatively simple but useful lock-free data structure. Lock-free queues can be used for one-way communication with threads that cannot use locks to synchronize access to shared data.

Its implementation is straightforward because of the limited requirements: it only supports one reader thread and one writer thread. The capacity of the queue is also fixed and cannot change during runtime.

The writer thread is allowed to call:

• push(): adds an element to the queue

The reader thread is allowed to call:

• front(): returns the front element of the queue
• pop(): removes the front element from the queue

Both threads can call:

• size(): returns the current ...