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Which style guides? That makes no sense to me because 1) if you're writing a lock-free algorithm/data structure you presumably both know what you're doing and care a lot about performance, 2) many lock-free algorithms don't even require any seq_cst operations (or equivalent fences), and 3) weak memory orderings can be essential to getting acceptable performance in critical paths.

I would also note that aside from formal methods, LLMs are absolutely not trustworthy but the top frontier models can reason to some degree about weak memory orderings, and can at least find concurrency bugs which can be later confirmed by human expert review (preferably after eliminating false positives via adversarial LLM review of the findings).

by kccqzy1 hours ago|

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The well-known C++ Core Guidelines say this:

> Atomic variables can be used simply and safely, as long as you are using the sequentially consistent memory model (memory_order_seq_cst), which is the default.

That’s from https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines

A lot of companies’ in-house guidelines then say you are allowed to use acquire/release if you are implementing a lock, relaxed if are implementing a counter.

This IMO probably reflects most companies’ distrust in their own developers to develop lock free data structures.