# Atomic Monitor
The atomic monitor is a utility that behaves like a monitor over atomic data,
and has the potential to be more performant in certain circumstances.
A monitor is a useful utility for one thread to block on some data to fulfill
a condition, and another thread to mutate that data to satisfy that condition.
However, every mutation to the data involves the acquisition of a mutex, which
can be unnecessarily slow, especially when mutations are simple operations which
could be performed atomically.
The atomic monitor provides a monitor-like utility, for which lock acquisition
is only performed when necessary. That is, only when one thread is actually blocking
on a condition -- not if the data is only being atomically mutated, and not when
a thread blocks on a condition which is already satisfied.
### Example
use atomicmonitor::AtomMonitor;
use atomicmonitor::atomic::Ordering;
use std::sync::Arc;
use std::thread;
// atom monitor around an integer
let atom_monitor = Arc::new(AtomMonitor::new(0u32));
// 100 threads which increment the integer 10 times
for _ in 0..100 {
let atom_monitor = atom_monitor.clone();
thread::spawn(move || {
for _ in 0..10 {
atom_monitor.mutate(|atomic_int| {
atomic_int.fetch_add(1, Ordering::SeqCst);
});
}
});
}
// wait until the integer count reaches 1000
atom_monitor.wait_until(|int| int == 1000);
### Implementation
The `AtomMonitor` contains three data, the atomic data being guarded, an atomic
*notification request counter*, and a regular monitor which guards `()`.
Upon atomic mutation to the data, the request counter is loaded, and only if the
number is positive, the monitor is acquired and notified.
Upon awaiting a certain condition on the data, the data is atomically loaded,
and only if the condition is not already satisfied, the request counter is
atomically incremented, the monitor is blocked on until the condition is fulfilled,
and then the request counter is atomically decremented on exit.