For a general overview of what lock-free and wait-free algorithms mean, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-blocking_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N

For a general overview of what lock-free and wait-free algorithms mean, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-blocking_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-blocking_algorithm. Much of the foundational theoretical work in this area was done by Maurice Herlihy in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, https://cs.brown.edu/~mph/Herlihy91/p124-herlihy.pdf https://cs.brown.edu/~mph/Herlihy91/p124-herlihy.pdf I briefly paid for an ACM membership just so I could read his original work. (Well, I paid so I could read the literature in transactional memory, but I mostly ended up reading papers authored by Herlihy, co-authored by Herlihy, or analyzing Herlihy's work.)