[burntsushi]

Could you say more about why you see concurrency as a special thing to call out? I'm genuinely curious so that I can adapt how I explain this stuff in the future. It would help to understand the distinction you are seeing that I am not. :-)

[vitalyd]

Only because I've had several people ask me how Rust handles memory ordering after they've learned of Sync. Sync documentation focuses very narrowly on there being no data races against the type that implements it. There's also obviously a difference between a struct consisting of a single AtomicUInt (for example) and a struct consisting of a plain uint. The former can be published unsafely because it internally already provides the appropriate fences by virtue of the atomic. In the latter, it requires the publishing to provide the necessary fences. Again, I don't mean to say that doesn't make sense or is unexpected (after one thinks about it), but I'd urge a bit more focus on that part as well.

Given there's no official memory model, similar to say Java Memory Model, there's not much to go by (correct me if I'm wrong). The JMM, for instance, spells out what needs to happen for happens-before edges to be created. It also talks about racy publication of values. Granted there's no close analog to Rust's unsafe in Java. But saying "T: Sync means it's free of data races in safe code", while correct, is a slightly vacuous statement since that T interacts with other components. And yes, those components will likely involve unsafe code, and unsafe code has its own caveats, but still, I don't think it hurts to make this more pronounced. Concurrency is a special beast, rife with its own hard-to-debug hazards. Being a bit more verbose and possibly repetitive about the hazards won't hurt :).

[Manishearth]

I don't think it's vacuous. It's very important for compartmentalizing unsafe. It interacts with other components, and that statement tells you the responsibilities of both T implementing Sync, and abstractions accepting Sync types.

It is vacuous at a big picture level where you're trying to understand the complete thread safety story, but that was never what that statement was trying to convey.

----

I think documentation here can be improved, though. When I get more time one of the things I want to do is do a major revamp of the concurrency docs, including paragraphs on how the memory ordering stuff works. I'll include filling out the Sync docs in this, thanks for the feedback!

[dbaupp]

The atomic type doesn't provide the necessary fences automatically. Operations on it have various sorts of fencing, but these do not necessarily connect in the way you think they do. The partial initialisation problem of creating a struct and publishing a pointer happens for the atomic types too, as they don't (and should not!) do everything with sequential consistency.

[vitalyd]

Note that I didn't mention anything about it being automatic. It's merely a case of being more explicit about what may happen to the value.

Sequential consistency is irrelevant to the example I gave of a single valued struct. I wasn't talking about any ordering with respect other loads/stores.

[dbaupp]

Being explicit isn't relevant: a relaxed store to an atomic followed by publishing a pointer to it won't have the expected happens-before relationship (program order won't be respected).

In any case, the only reason to think about publishing is how loads and stores are ordered, so it isn't irrelevant. The single valued struct can still have the partial initialisation problem, it just appears as the single field being completely uninitialised.

[vitalyd]

That's all true, but I think we're talking past each other a bit. My point isn't about what mechanics would be used or the type of memory order specified (that's the irrelevant part), but merely to highlight that this could use more attention in the docs. The atomic used may be viewed as a "lint" to a reader/user that something interesting may be going on with how this type is used - similar to how *mut isn't automatically Sync; it's an opportunity for people to pause and think things through. If you're looking at a type absent of any atomics or concurrency primitives, it's not apparent that it may be used like that (particularly since Sync is auto-derived and doesn't appear in the source code of the type).

I know one can look at this as being unimportant because only unsafe code that works with Sync types carries the burden of upholding the invariants. But, I still contend that memory ordering ought to be discussed, somewhere, while there's no official memory model documentation (not even sure that's in the plans, although I feel like I may have come across a github issue for that).

Anyway, I don't think I'm saying anything new in this reply over my others. If you feel existing docs are adequate in this regard, that's fine - we can agree to disagree :).