Perfect Nerd Evolution

So, Merlin finally got around to sending me a few articles I was looking for (actually about a week ago). A whole bunch of sweet stuff in there. Algorithms for atomic, lock-free (thread-safe without the need for a mutex/read-write lock) stacks, queues, linked lists, deques (double-ended queues), sets, hash tables, even a memory allocator. As well as algorithms for load/store with reserve (you read a variable, make some change to it, then write it back only if it hasn't been modified since you read it; if it's been modified, you start from the beginning again) on arbitrary variables (even structures larger than one processor word). Naturally I'm planning to add all/most of this to LibQ (we'll see if that ever happens).

So yeah, it's awesome. And to think I thought it was kinda pathetic when Merlin was going nuts when he found this stuff a year or two ago. I guess you can get more nerdy over time.

Incidentally, the title is a reference to The Wallflower (AKA Perfect Girl Evolution). A candidate title was Plato Lives (that's an inside joke; hopefully at least one person gets it).