Comment by smj-edison

> but your software is almost certainly not an operating system kernel.

In general yes, but right now I'm contributing to folk.computer, which is a multithreaded task scheduler/central DB (among other things not relevant to the topic at hand). The biggest use of atomics is during statement insertion and removal, by using RCU operations in the central trie.

One of our current performance drags is the interpreter we use is not threadsafe, so we have to serialize and deserialize objects as they move between threads. This contributes to about 30% of Folk's CPU usage. So I'm currently working on making a threadsafe interpreter by porting the Tcl interpreter we use (Jimtcl), and I'm learning all the fun things around atomic ordering and threaded data structures. So I'm definitely the audience for these data structures.