Crate linux_once

A Linux-optimized drop-in replacement for std::sync::Once

This crate implements the same thing as std::sync::Once except it internally uses Linux futex instead of CondVar. This leads to ridiculously simple code (compared to std) with no unsafe and theoretically a bit better performance. (Sadly, in practice the performance is roughly same.)

On non-Linux systems this crate just reexports Once from std so that you can unconditionally import Once from this crate and it'll work just fine.

This crate can reach 1.0 very soon. Things to resolve before then:

• wait for stabilization of force call?

Why this should have better performance, yet it doesn't?

Once in std is also implemented using atomics but waiters use thread::park for waiting. This happens to also be implemented using futex on Linux but with one difference: each waiting thread has its own futex. The Thread handles are sotred in an atomic linked list (really clever stuff) and the list is iterated when closure finishes execution waking the threads on-by-one, issuing syscall for each thread.

This crate uses a single futex and a single syscall to wake up all waiters.

Here's where performance difference should be: one syscall should be less expensive than multiple syscalls.

So why is this not faster then?

Frankly, I have no idea. I guess there might be some crazy optimization that makes futex syscalls magically less expensive or maybe syscalls are nowhere near as expensive as I originaly thought. These are my speculations. If you happen to have more information, please let me know.

Structs

Once	A synchronization primitive which can be used to run a one-time global initialization. Useful for one-time initialization for FFI or related functionality. This type can only be constructed with Once::new().