parking_lot_core 0.6.3

An advanced API for creating custom synchronization primitives.
Documentation
This library exposes a low-level API for creating your own efficient synchronization primitives. # The parking lot To keep synchronization primitives small, all thread queuing and suspending functionality is offloaded to the *parking lot*. The idea behind this is based on the Webkit [`WTF::ParkingLot`](https://webkit.org/blog/6161/locking-in-webkit/) class, which essentially consists of a hash table mapping of lock addresses to queues of parked (sleeping) threads. The Webkit parking lot was itself inspired by Linux [futexes](http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/futex.2.html), but it is more powerful since it allows invoking callbacks while holding a queue lock. There are two main operations that can be performed on the parking lot: - *Parking* refers to suspending the thread while simultaneously enqueuing it on a queue keyed by some address. - *Unparking* refers to dequeuing a thread from a queue keyed by some address and resuming it. See the documentation of the individual functions for more details. # Building custom synchronization primitives Building custom synchronization primitives is very simple since the parking lot takes care of all the hard parts for you. A simple example for a custom primitive would be to integrate a `Mutex` inside another data type. Since a mutex only requires 2 bits, it can share space with other data. For example, one could create an `ArcMutex` type that combines the atomic reference count and the two mutex bits in the same atomic word.