Re: [RFC 2/2] rust: sync: Add atomic support

Boqun Feng
2024-06-16T15:50:59Z

On Sun, Jun 16, 2024 at 05:14:56PM +0200, Miguel Ojeda wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 16, 2024 at 4:16 PM Boqun Feng <boqun.feng@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hmm? Have you seen the email I replied to John, a broader Rust community
> > seems doesn't appreciate the idea of generic atomics.
>
> I don't think we can easily draw that conclusion from those download
> numbers / dependent crates.
>
> portable-atomic may be more popular simply because it provides
> features for platforms the standard library does not. The interface
> being generic or not may have nothing to do with it. Or perhaps
> because it has a 1.x version, while the other doesn't, etc.
>

Totally agreed, but that was the information all I could get at that
time ;-)

> In fact, the atomic crate is essentially about providing `Atomic<T>`,
> so one could argue that all those downloads are precisely from people
> that want a generic atomic.
>
> Moreover, I noticed portable-atomic's issue #1 in GitHub is,
> precisely, adding `Atomic<T>` support. The maintainer has a PR for
> that updated over time, most recently a few hours ago.
>

Wait! Could it be because of me? Or I'm thinking too much about myself
;-)

> There is also `AtomicCell<T>` from crossbeam, which is the first
> feature listed in its docs.
>
> Anyway...
>
> The way I see it, both approaches seem similar (i.e. for what we are
> going to use them for today, at least) and neither apparently has a
> major downside today for those use cases (apart from needed refactors
> later to go to another approach).
>
> (By the "generic approach", by the way, I mean just providing
> `Atomic<{i32,i64}>`, not a complex design)
>
> So it is up to you on what you send for the non-RFC patches, of
> course, and if nobody has the time / wants to do the work for the
> "simple" generic approach, then we can just go ahead with this for the
> moment. But I think it would be nice to at least consider the "simple"
> generic approach to see how much worse it would be.
>

What would work for me is a somewhat concrete design consensus (on what
sizes we are going to support, the expectation on how many traits we are
going to introduce, etc.) And then a simple generic approach is not a
problem. (But I remain my right to say "I told you so" ;-)) As I said,
we cannot just do generic because of generic, we have to have at least
some idea abou the things we are generify on (the scope and the cost in
term of how many more traits people need to understand).

> Other bits to consider, that perhaps give you arguments for one or the
> other: consequences on the compilation time, on inlining, on the error
> messages for new users, on the generated documentation, on how easy to
> grep they are, etc.
>

These seem non-issues to me (except the grep part), but I'm relatively
more familiar with atomics and Rust, so it's good to hear others
thought, or wait the feedback until we have the patchset to review.

Regards,
Boqun

> Cheers,
> Miguel