This introduces a backport of C11 atomics. It has four implementations; ranked
in order of preference, they are:
- GCC/Clang __atomic builtins
- GCC/Clang __sync builtins
- MSVC _Interlocked builtins
- C11 atomics, from <stdatomic.h>
The primary advantages are:
- Close adherence to the standard API gives us a defined memory model.
- Type safety: atomic objects are now separate types from non-atomic ones, so
that it's impossible to mix up atomic and non-atomic updates (which is
undefined behavior that compilers are starting to take advantage of).
- Efficiency: we can specify ordering for operations, avoiding fences and
atomic operations on strongly ordered architectures (example:
`atomic_write_u32(ptr, val);` involves a CAS loop, whereas
`atomic_store(ptr, val, ATOMIC_RELEASE);` is a plain store.
This diff leaves in the current atomics API (implementing them in terms of the
backport). This lets us transition uses over piecemeal.
Testing:
This is by nature hard to test. I've manually tested the first three options on
Linux on gcc by futzing with the #defines manually, on freebsd with gcc and
clang, on MSVC, and on OS X with clang. All of these were x86 machines though,
and we don't have any test infrastructure set up for non-x86 platforms.
