Single Writer Design - Mechanical Sympathy

Mechanical Sympathy

There is also a really nice benefit in that when working on architectures, such as x86/x64, where at a hardware level they have a memory model, whereby load/store memory operations have preserved order, thus memory barriers are not required if you adhere strictly to the single writer principle. On x86/x64 "loads can be re-ordered with older stores" according to the memory model so memory barriers are required when multiple threads mutate the same data across cores. The single writer principle avoids this issue because it never has to deal with writing the latest version of a data item that may have been written by another thread and currently in the store buffer of another core.

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