Atomics is a new language feature in the C 11 and C++ 11 standards that requires runtime support from the operating system. For more information about using the atomics features, see the atomic_fence(3A), atomic_flag(3A), and stdatomic.h(3A) man pages.
Because there is not yet a standard interface for this runtime support, there are slight differences between the gcc atomics library and the Oracle Developer Studio atomics library.
GCC supports atomics with a runtime library called libatomic.so that is included in /usr/lib on Oracle Solaris 11.3 and Oracle Linux 7.x.
Oracle Developer Studio 12.6 compilers support atomics with a new runtime library called libstatomic.so. This library is bundled with the Oracle Developer Studio release, and is not included in Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux. This is an interim solution until the GCC and Oracle Developer Studio libraries can be merged and incorporated into Oracle Solaris and until the Linux-bundled library conforms to a standard interface.
The libstatomic.so library has been tested and is compatible with the GCC 4.8, 4.9, and 5.1 releases of libstatomic.so with a few exceptions discussed in Compatibility With GCC Atomics Library libatomic.
A new compiler option –xatomic enables you to specify whether to use the GCC libatomic library or the Oracle Developer Studio libstatomic library when linking your programs and libraries.