In my experience Left-Write is the clear place to start. It's general purpose and fast for reads. Only if that is unsuitable (eg memory usage) does one design a custom data structure. There's a Rust lib implementation with links to more resources:
Still, I think the left-right crate could benefit from one optimization I came up with. This is what the lib says in the docs:
> When WriteHandle::publish is called, the writer, atomically swaps the reader pointer to point to the other T. It then waits for the epochs of all current readers to change, and then replays the operational log to bring the stale copy up to date.
I think the lib could postpone the log replaying until the next publish. Chances are all readers will have the new epoch by than = the writer thread won't have to wait at all.
The first 3 years of my PhD summarized in one sentence.
I think you can't even do a new publish if all readers haven't finished switching to a new epoch after a previous publish. Otherwise, you risk corrupting readers that are still on the original epoch.
- create two ring buffers (left/right; I called them hot/cold)
- store the hot ring buffer in an atomic pointer
- single reader swaps hot and cold and waits for writers to finish