> Are those operations so important? Yes, absolutely. You can't even implement thread-safe reference counting (std::sync::Arc in Rust) without atomic RMW – or

> Are those operations so important? Yes, absolutely. You can't even implement thread-safe reference counting (std::sync::Arc in Rust) without atomic RMW – or even a thread-safe counter. A lock-free single-produce-single-consumer (SPSC) queue is pretty simple. As soon as you have more than one producer or more than one consumer, you need atomic RMW.