Release operation
An atomic operation with release ordering that synchronizes with a corresponding acquire operation, making preceding effects visible.
C++ Concurrency in Action, Second Edition
A release operation is an atomic operation whose ordering can synchronize with an acquire operation on the same memory location.
- How it is used
- Publishes earlier writes through an atomic location so an acquiring thread can access protected or newly constructed data.
- How deep it goes
- Traces sequenced-before, synchronizes-with, and happens-before through a spinlock and successful or failed stack compare/exchange operations.
- Examples
- Uses an atomic_flag spinlock and a reference-counted lock-free stack whose compare/exchange operations distinguish success from failure ordering.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via C++ atomic memory orders to publish data with release and require acquire before reading dependent non-atomic fields.
Read how C++ Concurrency in Action, Second Edition explains release operation →
Modern C, Third Edition
A release operation is a synchronization operation that makes preceding effects available to a corresponding acquire operation.
- How it is used
- Coordinates visibility of effects between threads through paired C library synchronization actions.
- How deep it goes
- Defines publication through synchronization and works through call_once, while deferring detailed mutex behavior.
- Examples
- Uses call_once initialization, thread creation and joining, thread termination, and mutex release–acquisition pairs.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate which preceding effects become visible after a corresponding C synchronization operation.
Read how Modern C, Third Edition explains release operation →
Related concepts
- synchronizes-with relationproduces · A synchronizes-with relation is an inter-thread ordering relationship in which a synchronization operation establishes visibility of effects from one thread to another.
- call_onceimplemented by · call_once is a threading operation that coordinates callers so a specified callback is successfully executed at most once for a given once-control object.
- release barrierequivalent to · A release barrier is a memory-ordering constraint that prevents preceding memory operations from being moved after the barrier.
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