[the8472]

> I'm having trouble thinking of a real world example where you'd want an atomic operation going ham in a loop without any sort of time or synchronization.

By using another atomic op as synchronization? After all that's their stated purpose.

[alecrn]

But I don't think in go atomic ops are considered synchronization in the sense that they force two goroutines to synchronize at a particular point like a chan. I.e. a chan send in one goroutine must be matched with a chan receive in another (unless they're buffered). If you have an atomic operation between two synchronization points I'd expect the only guarantee is that it occurs between the two points, and when it does it happens atomically.