Lock-free algorithms will usually boil down to some combination of polling, waiting (sleep(), futex-style), or use what are essentially more fine-grained, hardware-backed locks (CAS, memory barriers, LOCK instructions, hardware-specific transactional instructions, etc). The locks are very much still there.
I never liked that term.
Lock-free algorithms will usually boil down to some combination of polling, waiting (sleep(), futex-style), or use what are essentially more fine-grained, hardware-backed locks (CAS, memory barriers, LOCK instructions, hardware-specific transactional instructions, etc). The locks are very much still there.