Hands-On Concurrency with Rust

Tradeoffs

Assuming that conc was brought up to speed with modern Rust, where would you want to apply it? Well, let's compare it to reference counting. In a reference-counting data structure, every read and modification requires manipulating atomic values, implying some level of synchronization between threads with an impact on performance. A similar situation exists with hazard pointers, though to a lesser degree. As we've seen, the hazard requires synchronization, but reading anything apart from the hazard, through it, is going to be at machine speed. That's a significant improvement over reference counting. Furthermore, we know that the hazard pointer approach does accumulate garbage—and the implementation of conc is done via an especially ...