Atomicity, volatility and immutability are different, part one

I get a fair number of questions about atomicity, volatility, thread safety, immutability and the like; the questions illustrate a lot of confusion on these topics. Let's take a step back and examine each of these ideas to see what the differences are between them.

First off, what do we mean by "atomic"? From the Greek ἄτομος, meaning "not divisible into smaller parts", an "atomic" operation is one which is always observed to be done or not done, but never halfway done. The C# specification clearly defines what operations are "atomic" in section 5.5. The atomic operations are reads and writes of variables of any reference type, or, effectively, any built-in value type that takes up four bytes or less, like int, short and so on. Reads and writes of variables of value types that take more than four bytes, like double, long and decimal, are not guaranteed to be atomic by the C# language.

What does it mean for a read and write of an int to be atomic?  Suppose you have static variables of type int. X is 2, Y is 1, Z is 0. Then on one thread we say:

Z = X;

and on another thread:

X = Y

Each thread does one read and one write. Each read and write is itself atomic. What is the value of Z? Without any synchronization, the threads will race. If the first thread wins then Z will be 2. If the second thread wins then Z will be 1. But Z will definitely be one of those two values, you just can't say which.

David Corbin asks in a comment to my previous entry whether immutable structs are guaranteed to be written atomically regardless of their size. The short answer is no; why would they be? Consider:

struct MyLong 

{

    public readonly int low;

    public readonly int high;

    public MyLong(low, high) 

    {

        this.low = low;

        this.high = high;

    }

}

Ignore for the moment the evil that is public fields. Suppose we have a fields Q, R and S of type MyLong initialized to (0x01234567, 0x0BADF00D), (0x0DEDBEEF, 0x0B0B0B0B) and (0, 0),  respectively. On two threads we say:

S = Q;

and

Q = R;

We have two threads. Each thread does one read and one write, but the reads and writes are not atomic. They can be divided! This program is actually the same as if the two threads were:

S.low = Q.low;

S.high = Q.high;

and

Q.low = R.low;

Q.high = R.high;

Now, you can't do this because that's writing to a readonly field outside a constructor. But the CLR is the one enforcing that rule; it can break it! (We'll come back to this in the next episode; things are even weirder than you might think.) Value types are copied by value; that's why they're called value types. When copying a value type, the CLR doesn't call a constructor, it just moves the bytes over one atomic chunk at a time. In practice, maybe the jitter has special registers available that allow it to move bigger chunks around, but that's not a guarantee of the C# language. The C# language only goes so far as to guarantee that the chunks are not smaller than four bytes.

Read more: Fabulous Adventures In Coding

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