[swift-users] Atomics and Memory Fences in Swift

[Anders Ha]

Hi guys

I have recently started adopting lock-free atomics with memory fences, but it seems Swift at this moment does not have any native instruments.

Then I read a thread in the Apple Developer Forum (https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/49334 <https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/49334>), which an Apple staff claimed that all imported atomic operations are "not guaranteed to be atomic". But for my tests with all optimizations enabled (-Owholemodule and -O), the OSAtomic primitives and stdatomic fences do not seem going wild.

Is these `atomic_*` and `OSAtomic*` primitives really unsafe in Swift as claimed? It doesn't seem like the Swift compiler would reorder memory accesses around a C function call that it wouldn't be able to see through.

P.S. Is any of these primitives available on Linux? It seems the glibc modulemap does not export an `stdatomic` submodule at all.

Best Regards,
Anders

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