Just a quick heads up that we needed to introduce a breaking change to JUCE’s Atomic class. Before this change the following code would assert:
int i;
int* a (&i);
Atomic<int*> b (a);
jassert (++a == ++b);
This is because pointer arithmetic would behave differently on real pointers vs. pointers wrapped in JUCE’s Atomic class: Atomic would always increment/decrement by only a single byte. This was not only super confusing but would also lead to un-aligned memory access (for example: *(++a) = 0).
Unfortunately, anybody relying on JUCE’s old and confusing behaviour will need to update their code or risk random behaviour or - worse - crashes.
Yes, the motivation for this change is to make JUCE’s Atomic class be a simple wrapper around std::atomic on platforms that support this. This is why we needed to make this breaking change to align their behaviour.
With this commit JUCE’s Atomic class is now a wrapper around std::atomic on supported platforms. The Atomic class methods simply call the corresponding std::atomic method so it should be backwards compatible, with the exception of the Atomic::compareAndSetValue() method which has been deprecated as std::atomic does not have an equivalent.
