On 29/10/2012 4:09pm, Mark Hackett wrote:
Is that actually true? It may be guaranteed on Intel x86 compatibles and Linux (because of the string operations available in the x86 instruction set), but I don't thing anything other than an IPC message has a "you can write a string atomically" guarantee. And I may be misremembering that.
The guarantee I was talking about is for pipes on Unix: <quote> POSIX.1-2001 says that write(2)s of less than PIPE_BUF bytes must be atomic: the output data is written to the pipe as a contiguous sequence. Writes of more than PIPE_BUF bytes may be nonatomic: the kernel may interleave the data with data written by other processes. POSIX.1-2001 requires PIPE_BUF to be at least 512 bytes. (On Linux, PIPE_BUF is 4096 bytes.) ... </quote> On Windows writes to pipes in message oriented mode are also atomic.
And even if it's part of the SUS, how do we know this is true for non-UNIX compatible systems?
We don't, but that isn't necessarily a reason to ban it as evil. -- Richard