Atomic Data Types
Now we will look at the atomic data types that C++ offers and their applications.
C++ has a set of simple atomic data types. These are booleans, characters, numbers and pointers in many variants. They need the header <atomic>
. You can define your atomic data type with the class template std::atomic
, but there are serious restrictions for your type std::atomic<MyType>
. For MyType
there are the following restrictions:
- The copy assignment operator for
MyType
, for all base classes ofMyType
and all non-static members ofMyType
, must be trivial. Only a compiler generated copy assignment operator is trivial. MyType
must not have virtual methods or base classes.MyType
must be bitwise copyable and comparable so that the C functionsmemcpy
ormemcmp
can be applied. Atomic data types have atomic operations. For exampleload
andstore
:
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