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by uuidgen 1703 days ago
> "lock-free algorithms" is a misnomer, you still have synchronization,

Lock-free doesn't mean that there is no synchronization. It is a way to synchronize memory access between threads from the start. It means that there is no additional locking to protect access to the shared resource - all read access is valid, from any number of simultaneous write accesses at least one succeeds (which is not true for some other algorithms like network exponential backoff).

Even on x86 the most common instruction you use is LOCK cmpxchg.