this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
100 points (100.0% liked)
Programming
24153 readers
414 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
IMO, circular buffers with two advancing pointers are an awesome data structure for high performance compute. They're used in virtualized network hardware (see virtio) and minimizing Linux syscalls (see io_uring). Each ring implements a single producer, single consumer queue, so two rings are usually used for bidirectional data transfer.
It's kinda obscure because the need for asynchronous-transfer queues doesn't show up that often unless dealing with hardware or crossing outside of a single CPU. But it's becoming relevant due to coprocessors (ie small ARM CPUs attached to a main CPU) that process offloaded requests and then quickly return the result when ready.
One cool trick that can be used with circular buffers is to use memory mapping to map the same block of memory to 2 consecutive virtual address blocks. That way you can read the entire contents of the buffer as if it was just a regular linear buffer with an offset.