Generalized Compare and Swap

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generalized compare-and-swap object with customizable comparison, and presents a wait-free universal construction that leverages this new object, expanding the flexibility of concurrent synchronization primitives.

Contribution

It proposes a natural generalization of compare-and-swap replacing equality with arbitrary comparators and provides a wait-free universal construction based on this generalization.

Findings

Successfully generalized compare-and-swap with arbitrary comparator

Developed a wait-free universal construction using the generalized object

Proved correctness of the new construction

Abstract

In this paper, we first propose a natural generalization of the well-known compare-and-swap object, one that replaces the equality comparison with an arbitrary comparator. We then present a simple wait-free universal construction using this object and prove its correctness.