Well, you could also perform CAS using AtomicReference -- the examples in Maurice Herlihy's The Art of Multiprocessor Programming [1] and Brian Goetz' Java Conc

Well, you could also perform CAS using AtomicReference -- the examples in Maurice Herlihy's The Art of Multiprocessor Programming [1] and Brian Goetz' Java Concurrency In Practice [2] do that. So you don't really need to use sun.misc.Unsafe in your own code (of course, you need CAS to implement AtomicReference in the first place). You're also completely correct about placement new: I am working on a cleaned up version of this class, this was essentially a first pass to get myself more familiar with concurrency in c++0x. What complicates things a bit is that allocators are (much like all else in STL) meant to be used as class template arguments, which makes main separate compilation impossible -- hence the need of an adapter from an STL-style allocator to a pure virtual class. Separate compilation is why I also made a void* version of this initially. I have a much cleaned up version in the work that will handle more than void . There's an implementation I call it ConcurrentLinkedQueueImpl that handles just void , that is compiled separately -- and there is generic version ConcurrentLinkedQueue that is specialized for void * (ends up just proxying the calls to ConcurrentLinkedQueueImpl), with the generic version (in turn) using ConcurrentLinkedQueue<void *> and placement new to hold any type. Once again, the version posted there was a rough pass to get myself familiar with 0x concurrency constructs and hazard pointers -- the code is fairly messy. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Art-Multiprocessor-Programming-Maurice-Herlihy/dp/0123705916 http://www.amazon.com/Art-Multiprocessor-Programming-Maurice... [2] Everyone should read this book cover to cover -- http://jcip.net/ http://jcip.net/