Win32 Read/Write Lock Using Only Critical Sections

Question

I have to implement a read/write lock in C++ using the Win32 api as part of a project at work. All of the existing solutions use kernel objects (semaphores and mutexes) tha

Answer 1

This is an old question but perhaps someone will find this useful. We developed a high-performance, open-source RWLock for Windows that automatically uses Vista+ SRWLock Michael mentioned if available, or otherwise falls back to a userspace implementation.

As an added bonus, there are four different "flavors" of it (though you can stick to the basic, which is also the fastest), each providing more synchronization options. It starts with the basic RWLock() which is non-reentrant, limited to single-process synchronization, and no swapping of read/write locks to a full-fledged cross-process IPC RWLock with re-entrance support and read/write de-elevation.

As mentioned, they dynamically swap out to the Vista+ slim read-write locks for best performance when possible, but you don't have to worry about that at all as it'll fall back to a fully-compatible implementation on Windows XP and its ilk.