Wait-free progress condition
Wait-free is a progress guarantee under which every operation completes in a bounded number of steps, regardless of other threads' activity.
Latency
A wait-free data structure is a concurrent data structure whose every operation completes in a finite number of steps regardless of other threads' operations.
- How it is used
- Provides a per-operation progress guarantee for latency-sensitive shared data without depending on a lock holder.
- How deep it goes
- Defines progress variants and develops a bounded SPSC queue with atomic ordering, while identifying linked-list allocation and reclamation difficulties.
- Examples
- Uses a wait-free hash-map lookup, linked-list insertion and deletion, and a benchmarked bounded SPSC queue.
- What you can do after
- Build it from scratch as a bounded Rust SPSC queue using atomic indexes and acquire/release ordering.
C++ Concurrency in Action, Second Edition
Wait-free describes a progress guarantee in which every thread completes its operation in a bounded number of steps, regardless of other threads’ activity.
- How it is used
- Classifies concurrent data structures by whether each thread is guaranteed to complete an operation despite other threads’ activity.
- How deep it goes
- Defines bounded per-thread progress, contrasts related guarantees, and identifies a lock-free example without showing a wait-free implementation.
- Examples
- Uses a C++ lock-free stack whose push() and pop() compare-and-exchange loops may retry indefinitely.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate whether a progress guarantee protects every thread or only guarantees that some thread completes.
Read how C++ Concurrency in Action, Second Edition explains wait-free progress condition →
Related concepts
- lockless techniquecontrasts with · Lock-free is a concurrency progress property that guarantees some operation completes within a finite number of steps despite contention, without relying on mutual-exclusion locks.
- spsc bounded queueincludes · An SPSC bounded queue is a fixed-capacity FIFO data structure with exactly one producer and one consumer.
- atomicityuses · Atomicity is the property that an operation or group of operations takes effect as an indivisible, all-or-nothing unit, without observable partial effects.
- memory barrieruses · A memory barrier is a synchronization operation that constrains the ordering or visibility of memory accesses across concurrent execution.
- wait-free synchronizationimplemented by · A concurrency technique in which every operation completes in a bounded number of steps, regardless of the actions or delays of other threads.
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