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ARC: shard the weak-reference table - #401

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DTW-Thalion:arc-weak-table-sharding
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ARC: shard the weak-reference table#401
DTW-Thalion wants to merge 1 commit into
gnustep:masterfrom
DTW-Thalion:arc-weak-table-sharding

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@DTW-Thalion

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Stacked on #399 and depends on it, so the diff currently includes #399's atomic-refcount commit; that drops out once #399 merges.

The weak-reference table used a single global lock, so weak operations on unrelated objects serialised on one mutex and scaled negatively with core count. This splits the table into address-keyed stripes, each with its own lock, so weak traffic on different objects proceeds in parallel.

Follow-up commits make the stripe count configurable (a build flag or the OBJC_WEAK_SHARD_COUNT environment variable), close a lock-selection race the sharding introduced (a use-after-free found under AddressSanitizer, reproducible with more than one shard), and make weak-slot access atomic so the sharding is also sound on weakly-ordered targets (checked under ThreadSanitizer).

Opening as a draft while #399 is in review.

@davidchisnall

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This looks more invasive than it should be. The original refactoring to make the type used for a weak ref table distinct was intended to make it easy to provide a replacement that did the sharding internally.

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DTW-Thalion force-pushed the arc-weak-table-sharding branch from ff83926 to 79eb446 Compare July 24, 2026 13:01
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DTW-Thalion marked this pull request as ready for review July 28, 2026 01:27
@DTW-Thalion
DTW-Thalion force-pushed the arc-weak-table-sharding branch from 79eb446 to ddc3ebc Compare July 28, 2026 03:23
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