I have never seen lock-free synchronization touted as a simpler alternative to locking. (And I do lock-free synchronization.) Avoiding synchronization as much a

I have never seen lock-free synchronization touted as a simpler alternative to locking. (And I do lock-free synchronization.) Avoiding synchronization as much as possible is a good principle - one which I use often, and I actually contend is the only way to write scalable code. But someone always need to eventually synchronize. Even if it's not your code explicitly, somewhere, your code will have to rely on code someone else wrote that synchronizes. This article is aimed to those people.