alt Hacker NewsOnly the read of data small enough to be read atomically will complete in a bounded amount of time (i.e. not larger than 16 bytes on the current x86 or Arm CPUs).
If you have a bigger shared data structure, in which some other thread writes continuously, there exists absolutely no way to stop it and no way for any other thread to progress.
No, such algorithms exist and they use various mechanisms to achieve this. For larger data structures a common trick is to make a copy, update the copy, and then replace the original or parts of it with the copy. This provide readers with a stable view of the data structure that does not depend on small atomic reads. Another mechanism is that the different threads help each other to complete their interrupted work instead of making it invalid by modifying the data right away.