Lock-Free Queues: Start With One Writer
Ring buffers and lock-free queues are reported at more than one firm, and there is a reason interviewers ask for the single-producer single-consumer version specifically. It is the one lock-free structure that a competent engineer can get right in twenty minutes, and it is genuinely what sits between the network thread and the strategy thread in a real system. This lesson writes the whole of it, reads its orderings line by line, and then shows what each extra writer costs.
Why one writer changes everything
In an SPSC ring, one thread only ever writes the write index and one thread only ever writes the read index. Each index has exactly one writer, so no two threads ever contend to modify the same variable, and no compare-exchange is required anywhere. Here is the complete structure.
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