SPNLCK – Portable Spinlock for C

A lightweight, cross-platform spinlock implementation for multithreading in C.

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Features

• Works on x86, x64, ARM, ARM64

• Supports MSVC and GCC/Clang

• Uses CPU-friendly pause/yield to reduce busy-wait overhead

• Simple API: init, try_acquire, acquire, release

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Quick Start

#include <spnlck/spnlck.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    spnlck lock;
    spnlck_init(&lock);

    spnlck_acquire(&lock);
    printf("Critical section!\n");
    spnlck_release(&lock);

    return 0;
}

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API

spnlck_init(l) Initialize the spinlock spnlck_try_acquire(l) Try to acquire without blocking spnlck_acquire(l) Acquire and block until available spnlck_release(l) release the lock

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License

MIT