crossbeamutils

Crossbeam-utils is a Rust library crate that provides low-level utilities for building concurrent data structures and algorithms. It is part of the Crossbeam project, a collection of crates designed to simplify safe multi-threaded programming in Rust. Crossbeam-utils supplies reusable primitives and helpers that are used by Crossbeam's higher-level crates as well as by user code that requires fine-grained concurrency tools.

Key features include a thread-scoped API to spawn child threads within a function without requiring static lifetimes; AtomicCell<T> for atomic operations on non-Copy types; CachePadded<T> and Padded<T> to reduce false sharing by aligning data to cache lines; and Backoff, a small utility to implement backoff strategies in spin loops. These components are designed to be lightweight, portable, and independent from a specific data structure, making them broadly applicable.

Usage and role: Developers integrate crossbeam-utils when they need reliable scoped concurrency or atomic updates of complex data. The crate is used by other Crossbeam crates to implement their functionality, and it is a common dependency for building high-performance concurrent Rust programs.

Maintenance and license: Crossbeam-utils is maintained as part of the Crossbeam project. It is released with dual licensing under MIT and Apache-2.0, in line with the broader Crossbeam ecosystem.

See also: Crossbeam, crossbeam-channel, crossbeam-queue, crossbeam-deque, crossbeam-epoch.