Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gsvelto 1348 days ago
You're confusing general purpose locks with special-purpose ones used in the memory allocator. Firefox has its own GP locks, you can find them here: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=&path=xpcom%2...*

However those are not suitable for use in the memory allocator, and neither are WebKit's. WebKit uses os_unfair_lock within its memory allocator:

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/520379e30f3b2b6d4de995...

And so does Chromium:

https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:bas...

1 comments

Correct, and that isn't what this article is talking about.

This article is about an internal function in the OS that they've decided to is what they'd like to use, and that the only reason they aren't using it is because it doesn't exist in older versions of macOS, because you know, it is an implementation detail of the OS.

os_unfair_lock are a documented part of the OS API: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/os/1646466-os_unfa...

Just a note thay you're replying to the author, so I'm sure they know what it's talking about :)