CppCon 2016

Highly performant and scalable techniques such as RCU have been quite successful in read-mostly situations. However, there do come times when updates are necessary. It would be convenient if there was some general update-side counterpart to RCU, but sadly there is not yet any such thing. Nevertheless, there are a number of specialized update-side techniques whose performance and scalability rival that of RCU. This talk will discuss several of them and provide an outlook into the future of low-overhead scalable updates.

One technique is the solution to the Issaquah Challenge, which was put forward at the C++ standards committee meeting in early 2014 at Issaquah, WA, USA. This challenge requires a performant and scalable technique to atomically move elements back and forth between a pair of search trees, but without using transactional memory. This talk will give an overview of a solution to a more general problem, that of atomically moving groups of elements among a group of several different types of linked data structures, including simple linked lists, hash tables, and skiplists, while still permitting lockless searches before, during, and after this atomic move.