research!rsc: Hardware Memory Models (Memory Models, Part 1)

Introduction: A Fairy Tale, Ending A long time ago, when everyone wrote single-threaded programs, one of the most effective ways to make a program run faster was to sit back and do nothing. Optimizations in the next generation of hardware and the next generation of compilers would make the program run exactly as before, just faster. During this fairy-tale period, there was an easy test for whether