Is it possible to create thread-safe collections without locks?

Question

This is pure just for interest question, any sort of questions are welcome.

So is it possible to create thread-safe collections without any locks? By locks I mean any thread synchronization mechanisms, including Mutex, Semaphore, and even Interlocked, all of them. Is it possible at user level, without calling system functions? Ok, may be implementation is not effective, i am interested in theoretical possibility. If not what is the minimum means to do it?

EDIT: Why immutable collections don't work.

This of class Stack with methods Add that returns another Stack.

Now here is program:

Stack stack = new ...;

ThreadedMethod()
{
   loop
   {
      //Do the loop
      stack = stack.Add(element);
   }
}

this expression stack = stack.Add(element) is not atomic, and you can overwrite new stack from other thread.

Thanks, Andrey

Answer 1

There seem to be misconceptions by even guru software developers about what constitutes a lock.

One has to make a distinction between atomic operations and locks. Atomic operations like compare and swap perform an operation (which would otherwise require two or more instructions) as a single uninterruptible instruction. Locks are built from atomic operations however they can result in threads busy-waiting or sleeping until the lock is unlocked.

In most cases if you manage to implement an parallel algorithm with atomic operations without resorting to locking you will find that it will be orders of magnitude faster. This is why there is so much interest in wait-free and lock-free algorithms.

There has been a ton of research done on implementing various wait-free data-structures. While the code tends to be short, they can be notoriously hard to prove that they really work due to the subtle race conditions that arise. Debugging is also a nightmare. However a lot of work has been done and you can find wait-free/lock-free hashmaps, queues (Michael Scott's lock free queue), stacks, lists, trees, the list goes on. If you're lucky you'll also find some open-source implementations.

Just google 'lock-free my-data-structure' and see what you get.

For further reading on this interesting subject start from The Art of Multiprocessor Programming by Maurice Herlihy.

Answer 2

Yes, immutable collections! :)

Answer 3

Yes, it is possible to do concurrency without any support from the system. You can use Peterson's algorithm or the more general bakery algorithm to emulate a lock.

Answer 4

It really depends on how you define the term (as other commenters have discussed) but yes, it's possible for many data structures, at least, to be implemented in a non-blocking way (without the use of traditional mutual-exclusion locks).

I strongly recommend, if you're interested in the topic, that you read the blog of Cliff Click -- Cliff is the head guru at Azul Systems, who produce hardware + a custom JVM to run Java systems on massive and massively parallel (think up to around 1000 cores and in the hundreds of gigabytes of RAM area), and obviously in those kinds of systems locking can be death (disclaimer: not an employee or customer of Azul, just an admirer of their work).

Dr Click has famously come up with a non-blocking HashTable, which is basically a complex (but quite brilliant) state machine using atomic CompareAndSwap operations.

There is a two-part blog post describing the algorithm (part one, part two) as well as a talk given at Google (slides, video) -- the latter in particular is a fantastic introduction. Took me a few goes to 'get' it -- it's complex, let's face it! -- but if you presevere (or if you're smarter than me in the first place!) you'll find it very rewarding.