Comment by spacechild1

> How often does a video game really need a lock that can be shared between processes,

What do you mean? SRWLock (or the older CRITICAL_SECTION) cannot be shared between processes. A (Win32) Mutex does work across processes, but that's its entire purpose. So Windows does have different tools for different jobs.

In fact, it's really the other way round: on Linux, a futex also works across processes, but there is no equivalent in Windows. (Sadly, WaitOnAddress can only be used in a single process.)