6.51. Legacy __sync Built-in Functions for Atomic Memory Access

6.51 Legacy __sync Built-in Functions for Atomic Memory Access

The following built-in functions are intended to be compatible with those described in the Intel Itanium Processor-specific Application Binary Interface, section 7.4. As such, they depart from normal GCC practice by not using the ‘__builtin_’ prefix and also by being overloaded so that they work on multiple types.

The definition given in the Intel documentation allows only for the use of the types int, long, long long or their unsigned counterparts. GCC allows any scalar type that is 1, 2, 4 or 8 bytes in size other than the C type _Bool or the C++ type bool. Operations on pointer arguments are performed as if the operands were of the uintptr_t type. That is, they are not scaled by the size of the type to which the pointer points.

These functions are implement