I'm sorry, and I don't mean to whine, but I don't think this is really HN material. Pretty much everyone who's used a spinlock instead of a semaphore knows that

I'm sorry, and I don't mean to whine, but I don't think this is really HN material. Pretty much everyone who's used a spinlock instead of a semaphore knows that a context switch can be more expensive than the alternatives. For a nontechnical audience (Reddit, nowadays), this may be original, but I hope it's not so revolutionary for most of us.