bits-atomic

Atomic bit operations on memory locations for low-level synchronization.

Atomic operations including CAS (compare-and-swap), fetch & add and variants suitable for low-level shared-memory synchronization.

The implementation is using GCC's builtin atomic operations (available in GCC >= 4) in C wrappers called through the FFI. See these links for background:

• GCC manual: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Atomic-Builtins.html

• GCC wiki: http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Atomic

Portability: This package is primarily developed on a Linux system, but should work wherever GCC >= 4 is available. It has been confirmed as working on OSX. On Windows, it should work with Cygwin but currently fails for vanilla Haskell-Platform 2010.1.0.0 as it still packages GCC 3.x. An installer for updated versions of GCC is available at http://www.mingw.org/ and should make this package work in connection with Haskell-Platform. Feedback on compatibility would be appreciated.

Testing: The following commands can be used to compile and run the test suite:

cabal unpack bits-atomic && cd bits-atomic-* # if not yet locally available
cabal configure -ftest
cabal build
cabal test

Recent changes:

• 0.1.3: Documentation updates, especially on portability. No functional changes.

• 0.1.2: Avoid using System.FilePath in Setup.hs to fix build failure on hackage