Concurrent Deferred Reference Counting

A library for high-performance reference-counted pointers for automatic memory management in C++.

This library is part of the following research project. If you use it for scientific purposes, please cite the corresponding papers:

Turning Manual Concurrent Memory Reclamation into Automatic Reference Counting
Daniel Anderson, Guy E. Blelloch, Yuanhao Wei
The 43rd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2022), 2022

Concurrent Deferred Reference Counting with Constant-Time Overhead
Daniel Anderson, Guy E. Blelloch, Yuanhao Wei
The 42nd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2021), 2021

Getting started

To use the library on its own, you can simply include the include directory. The library is header only and has no other dependencies. Our types are provided inside the namespace cdrc. You'll need a compiler that supports C++20. The library should work on Linux, MacOS, and Windows. The benchmarks however only work on Linux.

There may be some additional dependencies to run the benchmarks. To work with the tests and benchmarks, you will need a recent version of CMake. Compiling the benchmarks will also require the Boost library, the hwloc library, and the jemalloc library, but these are not required to just use our library itself. To produce the benchmark figures, you will additionally need a recent version of Python with Matplotlib.

Using the library

Our library provides three types that work similarly to C++'s standard shared_ptr and atomic<shared_ptr>. These types, and some of their important supported methods are:

• atomic_rc_ptr: atomic_rc_ptr<T> is closely modelled after C++’s atomic<shared_ptr<T>>. It provides support for all of the standard operations, such as atomic load, store, exchange and CAS.
  • load(). Atomically creates an rc_ptr to the currently managed object, returning the rc_ptr
  • get_snapshot(). Atomically creates a snapshot_ptr to the currently managed object, returning the snapshot_ptr.
  • store(desired). Atomically replaces the currently managed pointer with desired, which may be either an rc_ptr or a snapshot_ptr.
  • compare_and_swap(expected, desired). Atomically compares the managed pointer with expected, and if they are equal, replaces the managed pointer with desired. The types of expected and desired may be either rc_ptr or snapshot_ptr, and need not be the same. If desired is passed in as an r-value reference, then it is only moved from if the compare_and_swap succeeds.
  • compare_exchange_weak(expected, desired). Same as compare_and_swap but, if the managed pointer is not equal to expected, loads the currently managed pointer into expected. This operation may spuriously return false, i.e. it is possible that the value of expected does not change
• rc_ptr: The rc_ptr type is closely modelled after C++’s standard library shared_ptr. It supports all pointer-like operations, such as dereferencing, i.e. obtaining a reference to the underlying managed object, and assignment of another rc_ptr to replace the current one. It is safe to read/copy an rc_ptr concurrently from many threads, as long as there is never a race between one thread updating the rc_ptr and another reading it. Such a situation should be handled by an atomic_rc_ptr.
• snapshot_ptr: The snapshot_ptr type supports all of the same operations as rc_ptr, except that snapshot_ptr can only be moved and not copied. Additionally, while rc_ptr can safely be shared between threads, snapshot_ptr should only be used locally by the thread that created it. The use of snapshot_ptr should result in better performance than rc_ptr provided that each thread does not hold too many snapshot_ptr at once. Therefore, snapshot_ptr is ideal for reading short-lived local references, for example, reading nodes in a data structure while traversing it.

These types are provided in the correspondingly named header files: <cdrc/atomic_rc_ptr.h>, <cdrc/rc_ptr.h>, and <cdrc/snapshot_ptr.h>.

To allocate a new reference-counted object mananged by an rc_ptr, use the static method rc_ptr<T>::make_shared(args...) in the same way as the standard C++ std::make_shared. Alternatively, the convenient aliases cdrc::make_rc<T>(args...) and cdrc::make_shared<T>(args...) can be used.

As a simple example, the following code implements a concurrent stack using our library. You can read a complete implementation in stack.h in the examples directory.

struct Node { T t; rc_ptr<Node> next; }
atomic_rc_ptr<Node> head;

void push_front(T t) {
  rc_ptr<Node> p = make_rc<Node>(t, head.load());
  while (!head.compare_exchange_weak(p->next, p)) {}
}

std::optional<T> pop_front() {
  snapshot_ptr<Node> p = head.get_snapshot();
  while (p != nullptr && !head.compare_exchange_weak(p, p->next)) { }
  if (p != nullptr) return {p->t};
  else return {};
}

The head node of the stack is stored in an atomic_rc_ptr because it may be modified and read concurrently by multiple threads. Each node of the stack stores its next pointer as a non-atomic rc_ptr. This is safe, because although multiple threads may read the same pointer concurrently, the internal nodes of the stack are never modified, only the head is. Lastly, we can use a snapshot_ptr while performing pop_front, since reading the head is a short-lived local reference that will never be shared with another thread.

Weak pointers

In addition to the three main pointer types, three additional types are provided for writing more complicated data structures with cyclic references. To enable cyclic references to be collected, weak pointers are a kind of smart pointer that hold a reference to a shared object, but do not contribute to its reference count. Since they do not contribute to the reference count, they can not be read directly, but must instead be updgraded to an rc_ptr before they can be dereferrenced. We also provide a weak_snapshot_ptr type, which is analagous to snapshot_ptr, which enables reading from an atomic_weak_ptr without incrementing the reference count. The types, in summary, are:

• atomic_weak_ptr: atomic_weak_ptr<T> is analagous to atomic_rc_ptr<T> and is modelled after C++'s atomic<weak_ptr<T>>. It supports the same operations as atomic_rc_ptr for storing instances of weak_ptr, including load(), get_snapshot(), store(desired), compare_and_swap(expected, desired), and compare_exchange_weak(expected, desired). Note that get_snapshot returns a weak_snapshot_ptr rather than a snapshot_ptr.
• weak_ptr: weak_ptr<T> is modelled after C++'s weak_ptr<T> and supports the same interface. Note that weak_ptr can not be dereferrenced or read directly. To read a weak_ptr, it must be converted into an rc_ptr by calling its lock() method. weak_ptr can conversely be constructed from an instance of rc_ptr.
• weak_snapshot_ptr: weak_snapshot_ptr<T> is analagous to snapshot_ptr for atomic_weak_ptr. Note that it is possible for the reference count of an object to reach zero while holding a weak_snapshot_ptr that refers to it. However, it is guaranteed that the object will not be destroyed and hence is safe to read as long as the snapshot is held.

These types are provided in the corresponding headers <cdrc/atomic_weak_ptr.h>, <cdrc/weak_ptr.h>, <cdrc/weak_snapshot_ptr.h>.

Marked pointers

To support writing advanced data structures, we also support marked pointers. Marked pointers allow you to utilize some of the redundant bits of the pointer representation to store flags, avoiding the need to store flags adjacent to the pointer and having to use double-word instructions to read/write the pointer/flag pair atomically. To use marked pointers, the types marked_arc_ptr, marked_rc_ptr, and marked_snapshot_ptr can be used as substitutes for atomic_rc_ptr, rc_ptr, and snapshot_ptr respectively. There are also marked versions of the three weak pointer types, marked_aw_ptr, marked_weak_ptr, and marked_ws_ptr, for atomic_weak_ptr, weak_ptr, and weak_snapshot_ptr respectively. You can include them all from the header <cdrc/marked_arc_ptr.h> They support all of the same methods, but additionally support:

• get_mark(). Gets the current mark on the pointer.
• set_mark(mark). Sets the current mark on the pointer. The mark must be an unsigned integer at most 3, i.e., use only the bottom two bits.

Like regular rc_ptr, to create a new reference-counted object managed by a marked_rc_ptr, use marked_rc_ptr<T>::make_shared(args...).

As expected, the load method of marked_arc_ptr returns a marked_rc_ptr, and the get_snapshot method returns a marked_snapshot_ptr. The get method of marked_rc_ptr and marked_snapshot_ptr returns returns a raw pointer without the mark, and hence can be safely dereferenced.

Lastly, the marked_arc_ptr and marked_aw_ptr types also support these additional operations:

• compare_and_set_mark(expected, desired_mark). Atomically compares the current marked pointer with expected (which should be a marked_rc_ptr or a marked_snapshot_ptr), and, if they are equal, sets the mark to desired_mark and returns true. Otherwise returns false.
• set_mark_bit(bit). Atomically sets the value of the bit at the given position (must be 1 or 2) to 1
• get_mark_bit(bit). Returns the value of the mark bit at the given position (must be 1 or 2)

An example of how to use these marked pointers can be found in linked_list.h in the examples directory.

Using different memory management backends

CDRC can be configured to use different memory management algorithms under the hood, which can result in different performance profiles. By default, it uses the hazard-pointer backend, which has good performance and bounded garbage accumulation. There are four backends available to choose from, summarized in the following table.

Scheme	Throughput	Memory usage
Hazard-pointers (default)	Moderate	Low
Epoch-based reclamation (EBR)	High	High
Interval-based reclamation (IBR)	Moderate-high	Moderate-high
Hyaline	High	Moderate-high

Guard types

For every backend other than the default (hazard-pointers), an additional tool is required to safely use the smart pointer types. Before performing any potentially concurrent read or write to an atomic pointer type, the user must first acquire a guard object. For EBR and IBR, the guard object is of type cdrc::epoch_guard. For Hyaline, the guard object is of type cdrc::hyaline_guard. For example, using EBR, the pop_front method of our example stack becomes

std::optional<T> pop_front() {
  epoch_guard g;  // This is important!!
  snapshot_ptr_ebr<Node> p = head.get_snapshot();
  while (p != nullptr && !head.compare_exchange_weak(p, p->next)) { }
  if (p != nullptr) return {p->t};
  else return {};
}

The guard is released automatically at the end of the enclosing scope. Note that snapshot pointers cannot outlive the guard that they were created during. It is safe to hold multiple nested guards inside nested scopes. Guards should not be held for long periods of time, as they may delay memory reclamation and lead to the accumulation of more garbage. Ideally, the lifetime of a guard should denote the span of a single operation on the data structure.

Selecting an alternate backend

There are two ways to select an alternate memory management algorithm. One is to provide an additional template argument to the pointer types. For example, to declare an atomic_rc_ptr that uses EBR as the backend, we can write

cdrc::atomic_r_ptr<int, cdrc::ebr_backend<int>> p;

Note that this extra template argument applies to all six of the pointer types, and pointers with different memory management backends are not compatible (e.g., you can not store an rc_ptr<T, ebr_backend<T>> inside an atomic_rc_ptr<T, hp_backend<T>>).

Alternatively, a set of predefined alias templates for each of the pointer types with each backend are available. Each alias corresponds to the original pointer type with a suffix indicating the backend, e.g., atomic_rc_ptr_ebr<T> is an alias template for atomic_rc_ptr<T, ebr_backend<T>>. The full list of backend types and suffixes is as follows

Backend	Type	Suffix	Guard type
Hazard-pointers	cdrc::hp_backend<T>	_hp	None
EBR	cdrc::ebr_backend<T>	_ebr	cdrc::epoch_guard
IBR	cdrc::ibr_backend<T>	_ibr	cdrc::epoch_guard
Hyaline	cdrc::hyaline_backend<T>	_hyaline	cdrc::hyaline_guard

Note that the marked pointer alias templates also support both the additional template argument to select a backend, and the suffixed template alises, e.g., marked_aw_ptr<T, cdrc::ebr_backend<T>> and marked_aw_ptr_ebr<T> are valid and equivalent.

Configuring the CMake project for testing and benchmarking

To configure the project for testing and benchmarking, create a build directory and run CMake. This is as easy as

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

This will build both the benchmarks and the tests. By default, the CMake project will build in Release mode. You probably want to do a Debug build for testing, by adding -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug to the CMake configuration command. The tests can then be run by writing make test from the build directory. These will validate that the code is functioning sensibly. See benchmarks for information on running the provided benchmarks.