Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)

Intentionally or not, this post demonstrates one of the things that makes safer abstractions in C less desirable: the shared pointer implementation uses a POSIX mutex, which means it’s (1) not cross platform, and (2) pays the mutex overhead even in provably single-threaded contexts. In other words, it’s not a zero-cost abstraction.

C++’s shared pointer has the same problem; Rust avoids it by having two types (Rc and Arc) that the developer can select from (and which the compiler will prevent you from using unsafely).

Unfortunately, for C++, thats not true. At least with glibc and libstdc++, if you do not link with pthreads, then shared pointers are not thread-safe. At runtime it will do a symbol lookup for a pthreads symbol, and based off the result, the shared pointer code will either take the atomic or non-atomic path.

I'd much rather it didnt try to be zero-cost and it always used atomics...