I don't know anything about C++, so I don't know how similar the constructs
are, but it would be great if what you generated could be used for C as
well. C1X has atomics with different kinds of memory ordering constraints,
and of course threads with locks and mutexes.
-Chucky
On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 3:34 PM, John Regehr <regehr@cs.utah.edu
<mailto:regehr@cs.utah.edu>> wrote:
It looks like some compilers (for example GCC) are not too far from
being ready to try to comply with the C++0x memory model. This will be
a big job and they do not yet fully understand how this model will
interact with their optimizer. It's fair to say that most other C++
compilers will be running into similar issues in coming years. We can
help by adding C++0x memory model constructs to the set of things
Csmith can emit.
Note that I'm not suggesting that we emit "interesting" C++, which is a
very big job. Rather, we can emit C++ that looks very much like C but
that contains locks, atomics, volatiles, etc. I can't imagine there's
anything difficult about this, given the infrastructure we already have.
Hans Boehm has an excellent slide deck on what can go wrong when
compiling this sort of code:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/misc_slides/c++mm.pdf
The problem of determining the correctness of a compiler's translation
of a piece of code containing C++0x concurrency primitives is not
trivial, but basically it's not our problem. There exist (or will
exist) some smart checking tools for this sort of thing.
John