C++ and Beyond 2012: Herb Sutter - atomic Weapons 1 of 2

Well written article, nice and to the point. Do recommend. Decades ago I declared myself too stupid to use shared memory with threading; I have learned to avoid this whenever possible, or abstract away the memory access under a safe layer as soon as possible. One of the greatest decisions of my career. Memory model semantics is one of the parts of systems programming that is generally poorly understood; I have had long discussions with senior programmers who have spent their careers carelessly threading their code without realizing what is happening under the hood. Not only did some of them not properly understand the acquire/release model, but they were not even aware of its existence. For a more in-depth explanation, I recommend Sutter's excellent talk "Atomic <> weapons": [this video] . It is a two hour lecture, but it will be worth your time.