Summary

In conclusion, you do not need atomics to implement correct concurrent algorithms. However, they can be nice to have if you identify a concurrency bottleneck. You can replace some simple mutex-protected updates (such as counters) with atomics, provided you also use atomic reads to read them. You can use CAS operations to detect concurrent modifications, but also note that few concurrent algorithms need that.

In the next chapter, we will look at how we can diagnose problems and troubleshoot them in concurrent programs.