[Ecls-list] Special symbols that might benefit from implicit locking or thread-local bindings

[Philipp Marek]

Hello Matthew!

> Although GENSYM is more often used in the compile phase (which is
> single-threaded, at least for now), it can also be used by
> multithreaded user code at runtime.  Because GENSYM is standard,
> it's unlikely that user code would expect to have to use a lock to
> avoid its internal race conditions around *GENSYM-COUNTER*.  So
> possibly that GENSYM should implicitely use a lock, held the whole time
> between the getf and setf.
It should be possible to do that _without_ a lock by using an atomic_incf() or
equivalent operation, right? Nearly all architectures should provide something like
that.


Regards,

Phil