Advanced Thread Synchronization
The interlocked family of functions is great when you need to atomically modify a single value. You should definitely try them first. But most real-life programming problems deal with data structures that are far more complex than a single 32-bit or 64-bit value. To get "atomic" access of more sophisticated data structures, you must leave the interlocked functions behind and use some other features offered by Windows.
In the previous section, I stressed that you should not use spinlocks on uniprocessor machines and you should use them cautiously even on multiprocessor machines. Again, the reason is that CPU time is a terrible thing to waste. So we need a mechanism that allows our thread to not waste CPU time while ...
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