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Lock-Free Rust: How to Build a Rollercoaster While It's on Fire

âEvery stitch in that flag was a commitment to thread safety without locks. std::atomicwas the needle.â â Betsy Ross, Federalist Papers, Draft 29 (suppressed), 1782 Buckle your seatbelts, grab a helmet, and say goodbye to your loved ones because over the next few minutes, I am going to teach you more about lock-free data structures in Rust than any human being should reasonably know without a psychiatric evaluation.

You’ve written a memory allocator using raw pointers, bypassed every lock in the standard library, and now your freelist is a tiny, unsupervised thread rave where ownership rules are just polite suggestions. Because passing raw pointers between threads is like duct-taping fireworks to a Roomba, handing it a steak knife, and yelling “go fix the router!” — it’s technically motion, but it’s definitely not progress. Using Ordering::Acquire on that load is like cracking open a suspicious Craigslist apartment door only after checking the peephole, listening for weird sounds, and texting your friend your location, just in case.

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