Lock-Free Data Structures: A High-Performance Tightrope Walk

This article dives deep into the implementation of a lock-free array, `LockFreeArray`, in Rust. It uses atomics and a freelist to achieve lock-free insertion and retrieval of values across multiple threads, eliminating the performance overhead of locks. The article thoroughly explains `AtomicPtr`, `AtomicUsize`, `compare_exchange`, and the crucial role of memory ordering. Benchmarks demonstrate a significant performance advantage over `Mutex>>` (83.19% faster on average). However, the article stresses the inherent dangers of lock-free programming, requiring a deep understanding of memory models and atomic operations to avoid data races and memory leaks.