The single-writer, single-reader limitation is a big deal. You can work around it, but it's no longer the same thing, as what makes such queues so fast is that

The single-writer, single-reader limitation is a big deal. You can work around it, but it's no longer the same thing, as what makes such queues so fast is that they don't do CAS or other kinds of atomic operations at all. Such queues are extremely useful when you can ensure single-reader and single-writer, but it does not prevent us from need more general purpose solutions. More general solutions will require more synchronization, and if they do not want them to be fixed-sized structures, they will usually require some kind of linked structure. For practical examples of all of the above, see Boost's lockfree structures: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_61_0/doc/html/lockfree.html http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_61_0/doc/html/lockfree.html