Atomic operations in glib

["Tomasz Jankowski" <tomcioj gmail com>]

Hello!

I'm working on multithread code, and in some functions I need to access some
variables very often. In result I lock and unlock mutex protecting these
variables all the time. It affects performance very bad.

I figured out, that I can use atomic operation (provided by GLib) to
decrease mutex usage. I can store many things in one volatile gint variable
thanks to bits manipulation.

However I don't know if performing many atomic operations on one variable in
MT code is a good idea. Morover I'd like to know if GLib guarantees, that
atomic operations will be thread safe on all platforms supported by GLib.

Maybe there are some other contraindications, that I should use mutex
protection instead of atomic operations.