Atomic Support in C++

Atomic variables in the standard library

The standard library contains support for atomic variables, sometimes called atomics. An atomic variable is a variable that can safely be used and mutated from multiple threads without introducing data races.

Do you remember the data race example we looked at earlier where two threads updated a global counter? We solved it by adding a mutex lock together with the counter. Instead of using an explicit lock, we could have used a std::atomic<int> instead: