Maybe that’s a case of the wrong design? The index tables shouldn’t need global locks. It gets a little hairy if you need to be able to reallocate or move them

Maybe that’s a case of the wrong design? The index tables shouldn’t need global locks. It gets a little hairy if you need to be able to reallocate or move them (I.e grow them) but that happens at most a small number of times and there are ways of only taking the lock if that’s happening. I’ve implemented this pattern without locks or CAS in C++, and it works just fine. I’m currently using this pattern in rust (although with fixed size) and it works really well. The best part is it bypasses the borrow checker since an index isn’t a reference. So no compile time lifetimes to worry about. It’s awesome for linked lists, which are otherwise painful in rust. Also it can sometimes allow a linked list with array like cache performance, since the underlying layout is an array.