Crate pinboard

A Pinboard is a shared, mutable, eventually consistent, lock-free data-structure. This allows multiple threads to communicate in a decoupled way by publishing data to the pinboard which other threads can then read in an eventually consistent way.

This is not a silver bullet though, there are various limitations of Pinboard that trade off the nice behaviour described above.

• Eventual consistency:
  • Writes from one thread are not guaranteed to be seen by reads from another thread
  • Writes from one thread can overwrite writes from another thread
• No in-place mutation:
  • The only write primitive completely overwrites the data on the Pinboard

Structs

• GuardedRef
  Stores a pointer to a T, alongside a guard which protects the data from garbage collection.
• NonEmptyPinboard
  An wrapper around a Pinboard which provides the guarantee it is never empty.
• Pinboard
  An instance of a Pinboard, holds a shared, mutable, eventually-consistent reference to a T.