Crate atomptr

A safe, strongly typed (generic) atomic pointer abstraction to build datastructures, and lock-free algorithms on top of. Only uses libstd.

The standard library contains an AtomicPtr type, which by itself isn't very ergonomic to use, because it deals with raw pointers. This library assumes that types can always be heap allocated, wrapping them in a Box<T>, and provides a nicer (and safe!) abstraction for std::sync::atomic::AtomicPtr. Using this crate is fairely self-explanatory:

use atomptr::AtomPtr;
 
struct MyData { name: String }
let data = MyData { name: "Kookie".into() };
 
let a = AtomPtr::new(data);
println!("Name is: {}", a.get_ref().name);
 
let old_ref = a.swap(MyData { name: "Bob".into() });
println!("Name now is: {}, was {}", a.get_ref().name, old_ref.name);

Note that the type that is returned by get_ref and swap is Ref<T>, which means that the old data is not de-allocated after a swap, before this last reference goes out of scope. You can of course always manually call drop() on it.

Structs

AtomPtr	A safe atomic pointer wrapper
Ref	An alias for a referenced pointer