Question

The System.Threading.Interlocked object allows for Addition (subtraction) and comparison as an atomic operation. It seems that a CompareExchange that just doesn’t do equality but also GreaterThan/LessThan as an atomic comparison would be quite valuable.

Would a hypothetical Interlocked.GreaterThan a feature of the IL or is it a CPU-level feature? Both?

Lacking any other option, is it possible to create such a feature in C++ or direct IL code and expose that functionality to C#?

Answer 1

Update to the later post I made here: we found a better way to make the greater comparison by using additional lock object. We wrote many unit tests in order to validate that a lock and Interlocked can be used together, but only for some cases.

How the code works: Interlocked uses memory barriers that a read or write is atomic. The sync-lock is needed to make the greater-than comparison an atomic operation. So the rule now is that inside this class no other operation writes the value without this sync lock.

What we get with this class is an interlocked value which can be read very fast, but write takes a little bit more. Read is about 2-4 times faster in our application.

Here the code as view:

See here: http://files.thekieners.com/blogcontent/2012/ExchangeIfGreaterThan2.png

Here as code to copy&paste:

public sealed class InterlockedValue
{
    private long _myValue;
    private readonly object _syncObj = new object();

    public long ReadValue()
    {
        // reading of value (99.9% case in app) will not use lock-object, 
        // since this is too much overhead in our highly multithreaded app.
        return Interlocked.Read(ref _myValue);
    }

    public bool SetValueIfGreaterThan(long value)
    {
        // sync Exchange access to _myValue, since a secure greater-than comparisons is needed
        lock (_syncObj)
        {
            // greather than condition
            if (value > Interlocked.Read(ref  _myValue))
            {
                // now we can set value savely to _myValue.
                Interlocked.Exchange(ref _myValue, value);
                return true;
            }
            return false;
        }
    }
}