Also, several
people have referred to the atomicity of int/pointer
read/write. This is news to me - can someone point me at the spec for this?
its an architecture-specific issue. its not true on SPARCs and on some
NUMA systems. it has nothing to do with a language per se.
Is it really true on x86? Being that you can do unaligned accesses just
fine, you can certainly do cross-cacheline accesses. Pardon the skepticism,
but I've never heard such assertions before. Can anyone offer me a
specification for this?