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>Contention is where mutex implementations show their inequality. Mark was so impressed by Microsoft's SRWLOCK that he went on to recommend Linux and FreeBSD users consider targeting Windows if mutex contention is an issue.

Interesting, I remember reading a detailed article where they found that there's a lot of severe contention in the Windows kernel, compared to Linux. I think it was when they were trying to parallelize Chrome builds?

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https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and...

Maybe they weren't using SRWLock, at least last time I checked std::mutex didn't use it with MS STL(They were stuck with critical section because of binary compatibility).

I'm the Mark who's referenced there. When I did that original benchmark I discovered that the underlying mutex used by MSVCRT did change between versions. For example, in Visual C++ 2013, they used the Windows Concurrency Runtime, which was awful under heavy contention. Newer MSVCRT versions use SRWLOCK.

(And I wouldn't characterize myself as being overly impressed... for my particular scenario I wrote, "if you have a poorly written app that's bottlenecked on a lock, then consider targeting Windows to make the best of a bad situation." A better approach, of course, would be to just improve your code!)

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