US 9,002,897 B2Granted

Aspected interfaces and methods for synchronized containers and other data structures

AssigneeMicrosoft Technology Licensing, LLC

InventorsJohn-Mark Albertson, Douglas Kevin Service, Richard A. Molloy

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Abstract

The subject disclosure is directed towards an object (e.g., an aspected vector, queue, map, stack and so forth) container having an exclusive interface, a shared-read-only interface and a shared-write (and read) interface to a common set of data. Use cases during runtime determine the appropriate interface to use. No locking is needed with methods of the exclusive interface or the read-only interface. The shared-write interface is configured to have only concurrency safe methods. Also described is blocking the use of other interfaces while one interface is in use, and the use of reference counter tracking to know when no concurrent readers and/or writers remain, to allow transitioning to use a different interface.

Claims19

Dependent claims

In a computing environment, a system, comprising;

a memory coupled to a bus system, in which the memory includes computer useable program code and an aspected container comprising methods and data;
and
one or more processing units, in which the one or more processing units execute the container methods and the computer useable program code to interface with the aspected container, the aspected container including an exclusive interface, a read-only interface and a shared-write interface to a common set of data, in which the aspected container is configured to not permit improper data access, including that the exclusive interface, the read-only interface and the shared-write interface are based upon use case and interface pairings that provide method call blocking by code within the aspected container, and that the set of methods for the read-only interface and the shared-write interface are internally synchronized and concurrency safe, and in which the for the read-only interface synchronization occurs at the interface level to allow multiple interface methods to be invoked concurrently with no synchronization overhead at the method level.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.