To spell it out: I know very well what moonchild meant, and am no stranger to lockless algorithm design or memory ordering semantics. It was a turn of phrase riffing on the point that "memory ordering semantics are APIs" and thus should have been designed with an eye toward clarity and comprehension for the working programmers who need to use them.
Acquire/release was intended to make the job of a compiler author easier, by trying to home in on the differences between hardware that might be reasonably abstracted as a single API. And I'm saying that's a bad trade, because the compiler nerds are doing just fine and what the dumb jocks in the trenches want is read and write barriers.
I think it is just a generational difference. I learned lock-free programming during the standardization of the C++0x memory model and I do find acq/rel a simpler model to understand and analyse algorithms, while thinking in term of reorderings never clicked for me.
To spell it out: I know very well what moonchild meant, and am no stranger to lockless algorithm design or memory ordering semantics. It was a turn of phrase riffing on the point that "memory ordering semantics are APIs" and thus should have been designed with an eye toward clarity and comprehension for the working programmers who need to use them.
Acquire/release was intended to make the job of a compiler author easier, by trying to home in on the differences between hardware that might be reasonably abstracted as a single API. And I'm saying that's a bad trade, because the compiler nerds are doing just fine and what the dumb jocks in the trenches want is read and write barriers.