You can leverage the cpu's atomic operations such as compare and set, compare and swap, as well as the properties of the memory subsystem to achieve thread safe

You can leverage the cpu's atomic operations such as compare and set, compare and swap, as well as the properties of the memory subsystem to achieve thread safety without an operating system mediating the interaction. Here's a blog post from some people that have street cred to give you some idea of the potential performance benefits: https://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/2013/08/lock-based-vs-lock-free-concurrent.html https://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/2013/08/lock-based-...