Registration is now open for CppCon 2026! The conference starts on September 12 and will be held in person in Aurora, CO. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting videos of some of the top-rated talks from last year's conference. Here’s another CppCon talk video we hope you will enjoy – and why not register today for CppCon 2026!

Implementing Your Own C++ Atomics

by Ben Saks

Summary of the talk:

Atomic objects are extremely useful for concurrent programming. Unfortunately, some embedded toolchains like AVR-GCC omit portions of the C++ Standard Library, including headers like ＜atomic＞ .This makes it much harder to program concurrent software on these platforms, since many tutorials and open-source libraries assume Standard Library support. For example, these talks from past CppCons present lock-free data structures and algorithms that rely strongly on lock-free instantiations of std::atomic＜T＞:

Single Producer Single Consumer Lock-free FIFO From the Ground Up – Charles Frasch – CppCon 2023
Introduction to Wait-free Algorithms in C++ Programming – Daniel Anderson – CppCon 2024
User API & C++ Implementation of a Multi Producer, Multi Consumer, Lock Free, Atomic Queue – Erez Strauss – CppCon 2024

This session will show you how to implement your own atomic types in the absence of library support. These atomic types can greatly expand the number of tutorials and open-source libraries available for you to use. A clear understanding of how atomic types are implemented will also help you use objects of those types more effectively on platforms that do provide native support.