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Behavior of `t.atomic.rmw.cmpxchg` instructions

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#195 7 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
wasm
Domain
compilers

Research direction

Start with steps 17–21 of the linked WebAssembly threads specification and compare their t.atomic.rmw.cmpxchg semantics with C++ std::atomic<T>::compare_exchange_strong. No repository files or tests are identified; done would require resolving whether the specified behavior is intentional and determining any resulting specification change.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Hi,

As the 17. and 18. steps in the spec:

17. If c1 equals c2, then:
    Let c be c2.
18. Else:
    Let c be c3.

And the 21. step will write the c back to the memory.
Where c1 is the origin value on the memory, c2 is the expected value, c3 is the value to replace.

Maybe I can realize this as following simply:

if (memory[addr] != expected)
    memory[addr] = replacement;

But the closest function in C++ std::atomic<T>::compare_exchange_strong has the different behavior.

if (memory[addr] == expected)
   memory[addr] = replacement;

The atomic_rmw instructions are similar to the member functions of std::atomic<T> in C++ STL, such as fetch_add(), fetch_xor, etc.

Is it necessary to have the same behavior between cmpxchg instructions and std::atomic<T>::compare_exchange_strong in C++?

Thanks.

Dominant language
WebAssembly
Stars
767
Forks
54
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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