Does anyone know if there are any lock-free container libraries available for .NET ?
Preferably something that is proven to work and faster than the Synchronized wrappers we have in .NET.
I have found some articles on the .NET, but none of them specify any speed benchmarking, nor do they inspire much confidence in their reliability.
Thanks
Late, but better than never I thought I would add Julian Bucknalls articles to this list.
But he does not have performance numbers. In my testing of his structures the list scaled well compared to locking (very low kernel usage compared to ReaderWriterLock).
His blog has a series of articles on lock free structures in C#.
Without knowing anything about it, there is one library I stumbled across here.
Though probably not quite what you are looking for, at least there is an implementation and discussion on StackOverflow of a lock free queue structure in C# here. Going through the StackOverflow code review process might give some confidence about its safety, or provide information about how to go about building your lock-free containers yourself.
for(;;){...some code...}and it will have a return statement inside there. It has a comment at the top stating: "This queue is mostly for completion or for use in other classes in the library, considering that the 4.0 FCL already has a lock-free queue. The Mono implementation is very close to this, while the MS implementation is more complicated but should offer better use of CPU caches...<snip>" - Louis Somerswhile(true)is perhaps more popular today the former reads to me as "for ever" while the latter as "while basic-logical-rules-of-the-universe-hold", which disturbs me slightly. I did add some functionality beyond the FCL since that comment, I should edit it, but I think I'll save that until a more thorough review later this year. - Jon Hannagotoin hand-coded tail-call elimination) or quirky because the state-transitions are unusual compared to what would be natural if concurrency didn't have to be considered.while(true)andfor(;;)though are exactly the same, it's purely a matter of style.for(;;)is used in K&R and Stroustrup's C++ book butwhile(true)became more popular later on, sofor(;;)is just more old-fashioned. (Also some older tools will complain about the constant, though not in C#)... - Jon Hanna