Hey all,

I just wanted to update everyone on the latest developments in C++0x
(hopefully that will be C++08!). Lawrence Crowl, one of the members of
the committee gave a talk to google back in may about the developments:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3528799355371049884

One of the most important things is that C++ will have built-in
support for threads, including a memory model, synchronization and
atomics. Since he gave his talk, the committee has decided to add
limited support for fences as well.

Note that GCC currently has intrinsic support for atomic operations
(http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.1.0/gcc/Atomic-Builtins.html
) and even fences, so it's possible to build such types now that's at
least compatible with gcc. I'm going to write a prototype for and
atomic int for GCC if anyone is interested -- should be pretty simple
with those intrinsics, but who knows.

Lawrence sent me this. The papers are a bit hard to find, but knowing
which ones to look for helps a lot:

You can keep up at the C++ standards committee web site:

http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/

Under the link 'papers' you can find the latest papers in each area of
threading:

2007 N2427 C++ Atomic Types and Operations
2007 N2429 Concurrency memory model (final revision)
2007 N2440 Abandoning a Process
2007 N2459 Allow atomics use in signal handlers
2007 N2480 A Less Formal Explanation of the Proposed C++ Concurrency
Memory Model
2008 N2492 C++ Data-Dependency Ordering: Atomics and Memory Model
2008 N2493 C++ Data-Dependency Ordering: Function Annotation
2008 N2497 Multi-threading Library for Standard C++ (Revision 1)
2008 N2513 Dynamic Initialization and Destruction with Concurrency
2008 N2514 Implicit Conversion Operators for Atomics
2008 N2516 Threads API Review Committee Report
2008 N2519 Library thread-safety from a user's point of view, with
wording
2008 N2528 Timed_mutex in C++0x

-----------------------------
Bjorn Roche
XO Wave
Digital Audio Production and Post-Production Software
http://www.xowave.com
http://blog.bjornroche.com
http://myspace.com/xowave