[dooglius]

Hardware synchronization has better properties than software locks: it can't deadlock, is reentrant, won't get screwed up by a process holding a lock dying, and is (supposedly) guaranteed to complete in bounded time. I don't think it's unreasonable that the definition of lock-free ("guaranteed system-wide progress") focuses on the high-level behavior of typical software locks even if it ends up calling things that are still locks in some sense "lock-free".

[hnfong]

That’s the benefit you get from having code that defaults to a race condition instead of defaulting to deadlock.

(Which is better? I don’t know.)