Using atomic types

The thread support library offers functionalities for managing threads and synchronizing access to shared data with mutexes and locks, and, as of C++20, with latches, barriers, and semaphores. The standard library provides support for the complementary, lower-level atomic operations on data, which are indivisible operations that can be executed concurrently from different threads on shared data, without the risk of producing race conditions and without the use of locks. The support it provides includes atomic types, atomic operations, and memory synchronization ordering. In this recipe, we will see how to use some of these types and functions.

Getting ready

All the atomic types and operations are defined in the std namespace in the <atomic> header.

How to do it...

The following are a series of typical operations that use atomic types:

• Use the std::atomic class template to create atomic objects that support atomic operations, such...