The Contract

The foundation of multithreading is a well-defined memory model. From the reader’s perspective, it consists of two aspects. On the one hand, there is the enormous complexity of it, which often contradicts our intuition. On the other hand, it helps a lot to get a deeper insight into the multithreading challenges. In the first approach, I want to give you a mental model. That being said, the C++ memory model defines a contract.

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The Contract

This contract is between the programmer and the system. The system consists of the compiler that generates machine code and the processor that executes the machine code, and it includes the different caches that store the state of the program. The result is - in the good case - a well-defined executable that is fully optimized for the hardware platform. To be precise, there is not only a single contract, but a fine-grained set of contracts; i.e. the weaker the rules are that the programmer has to follow, the more potential there is for the system to generate a highly optimized executable.

There is a rule of thumb: the stronger the contract, the fewer liberties for the system to generate an optimized executable. Sadly, the other way around will not work. When the programmer uses an extremely weak contract or memory model, there are a lot of optimization choices. The consequences are that the program is only manageable by a handful of worldwide recognized experts worldwide, and neither you nor I am likely to belong to that group. Roughly speaking, there are three contract levels in C++11.