The Art of Multiprocessor Programming

Chapter 10. Concurrent Queues and the ABA Problem

Introduction

In the subsequent chapters, we look at a broad class of objects known as pools. A pool is similar to the Set class studied in Chapter 9, with two main differences: a pool does not necessarily provide a contains() method to test membership, and it allows the same item to appear more than once. The Pool has get() and set() methods as in Fig. 10.1. Pools show up in many places in concurrent systems. For example, in many applications, one or more producer threads produce items to be consumed by one or more consumer threads. These items may be jobs to perform, keystrokes to interpret, purchase orders to execute, or packets to decode. Sometimes, producers are bursty, suddenly and briefly ...