Atomic Data Types

C++ has a set of simple atomic data types. These are booleans, characters, numbers and pointers in many variants. They need the header <atomic>. You can define your atomic data type with the class template std::atomic, but there are serious restrictions for your type std::atomic<MyType>. For MyType there are the following restrictions:

• The copy assignment operator for MyType, for all base classes of MyType and all non-static members of MyType, must be trivial. Only a compiler generated copy assignment operator is trivial.
• MyType must not have virtual methods or base classes.
• MyType must be bitwise copyable and comparable so that the C functions memcpy or memcmp can be applied. Atomic data types have atomic operations. For example load and store: