Lock-free programming

Lock-free programming is hard. We will not spend a lot of time discussing lock-free programming in this book, but instead provide you with an example of how a very simple lock-free data structure could be implemented. There is a great wealth of resources—on the web and in books—dedicated to lock-free programming that will explain the concepts you need to understand before writing your own lock-free data structures. Some concepts you might have heard of, related to lock-free programming, such as Compare-And-Swap (CAS) and the ABA-problem will not be further discussed in this book.

Lock-free queue example

Here, we are going to show an example of a lock-free queue, which is a relatively simple but useful lock-free data structure. Lock-free queues can be used for one-way communication with threads that cannot use locks to synchronize access to shared data. 

Its implementation is straightforward because of the limited requirements: it only supports one reader thread and one...