Yeah, obviously if I needed a mutex I would use a mutex, I don't have that particular confusion and would expect pthread mutex to be well worn on the platform.

Yeah, obviously if I needed a mutex I would use a mutex, I don't have that particular confusion and would expect pthread mutex to be well worn on the platform. (And I noticed Darwin has some helpful pthread_mutex_attr values.) I am talking only about the case where you really want a semaphore.