Present a new synchronization API that combines hazard pointers and reference counters to leverage the benefits of each mechanism.
It uses hazard pointers as fast-paths, and falls back to reference counters either explicitly when the reader expects to hold the object for a long time, or when no hazard pointer slots are available.
This leverages the fact that both synchronization mechanisms aim to guarantee existence of objects, and those existence guarantees can be chained. Each mechanism achieves its purpose in a different way with different tradeoffs. The hazard pointers are faster to read and scale better than reference counters, but they consume more memory than a per-object reference counter.
Mathieu DESNOYERS
