The 8-Byte Lock: Packing a Reader-Writer Lock Into 64 Bits

💡Typhon is an embedded, persistent, ACID database engine written in .NET that speaks the native language of game servers and real-time simulations: entities, components, and systems. It delivers full transactional safety with MVCC snapshot isolation at sub-microsecond latency, powered by cache-line-aware storage, zero-copy access, and configurable durability. Series: A Database That Thinks Like a Game Engine Why I’m Building a Database Engine in C# What Game Engines Know About Data That Databases Forgot Microsecond Latency in a Managed Language Deadlock-Free by Construction Three Durability Modes, One WAL Building a Page Cache That Doesn’t Count MVCC at Microsecond Scale The 8-Byte Lock (this post) Why We Eliminated the Primary Key B+Tree (coming soon) GitHub repo • :mailbox_with_mail: Subscribe via RSS A reader-writer lock has a lot to keep track of. How many readers are inside right now. How many are queued at the door. How many writers are queued behind them. Which thread, exactly,…