Section: New Results

Compiling C/C++ Concurrency: from C++11 to POWER

Participants : Kayvan Memarian, Francesco Zappa Nardelli.

The upcoming C and C++ revised standards add concurrency to the languages, for the first time, in the form of a subtle relaxed memory model (the C++11 model). This aims to permit compiler optimisation and to accommodate the differing relaxed-memory behaviours of mainstream multiprocessors, combining simple semantics for most code with high-performance low-level atomics for concurrency libraries.

We studied the the correctness of two proposed compilation schemes for the C++11 load and store concurrency primitives to Power assembly, having noted that an earlier proposal was flawed. (The main ideas apply also to ARM, which has a similar relaxed memory architecture.)

This should inform the ongoing development of production compilers for C++11 and C1x, clarifies what properties of the machine architecture are required, and builds confidence in the C++11 and Power semantics.

A paper describing this work will appear in POPL 2012 [22] .