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Asked: 2026-05-18T02:23:27+00:00

I have been searching concurrent linked list implementations/academic papers that allow for concurrent insertions

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I have been searching concurrent linked list implementations/academic papers that allow for concurrent insertions to disjoint places in the list. I would prefer a lock based approach.

Unfortunately, all the implementations I’ve checked out so far use list based locking as opposed to something akin to node based locking.

Any help people?

EDIT 1: Thanks all for the initial responses. Using node based locking means that for insertion after a node or deleting a node I need to lock the previous and the next node. Now it is entirely possible that by the time Thread 1 tries to lock the previous node it got deleted in Thread 2. How to guard against such accidents?

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  1. Editorial Team

    I’m not able to recommend any libraries that do this for C specifically, but if you end up doing it yourself you could potentially avoid having to have thousands of locks by re-using a small number of locks and some “hashing” to decide which to use for each node. You’d get quite a number of cases where there wouldn’t be any contention if the number of locks is suitably larger than the number of nodes for little space overhead (and it’s fixed, not per node).

    Update, for EDIT 1

    You could work around this by having a per-list multiple reader, single write lock, (rwlock), where you acquire a “read” lock prior to getting the per-node lock for inserts, but for a delete you need to get the single “write” lock. You avoid unnecessary synchronisation issues for the read/insert operations fairly easily and deleting is simple enough. (The assumption is delete is much rarer than insert though)

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