Re: Use Interlocked* functions

[Rob Shearman]

Mike McCormack wrote:
> The most important reason in my mind to do this is so that people 
> implementing objects in the future copy code that uses the 
> Interlocked* functions.  There's no overhead to using those 
> functions... no penalty if we use them in code that doesn't need to be 
> thread safe, so we should just use them everywhere.

On uniprocessor machines this is true, but I don't think the same can be 
said for SMP/SMT machines. The "lock" prefix for the instructions causes 
the processor to emit a signal that tells all other processors to not 
access memory for a period of time. I haven't seen any benchmarks that 
say how much this costs, but it isn't "no overhead."

Rob