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I think it’s as simple as the industry not having reached consensus on “atomic” at the time Microsoft was naming these things. The terminology around concurrent

• dblohm7 4y ago
  > Windows programmers were more familiar with “critical sections” as an abstraction than mutexes. I disagree on that front. Mutex kernel objects have existed just as long as critical sections. Critical section objects are cheaper because they don’t switch into the kernel when not contended.
  • asveikau 4y ago
    A Win32 critical section enters the kernel when blocked. (Edit: nevermind, you're not disputing this) A pthread mutex on Linux won't enter the kernel when uncontended (thanks to futex -- this wasn't true ~20 years ago). I would say the terms are pretty synonymous, and implementation choices differ; sometimes implementation choices are implied by the name but I don't think everybody agrees on how those choices map to names.
  • codeflo 4y ago
    That’s only an implementation/optimization difference, I think it’s also relevant to understand why that’s the case. At the API level, the important distinction is that a Mutex an be shared between processes. This is great when you need it, but having the capability makes Mutexes have a somewhat expensive implementation. CriticalSections stay inside the process, so can be optimized for that (more common) use case.
    • dblohm7 4y ago
      Precisely.