I have never seen lock-free synchronization touted as a simpler alternative to locking. (And I do lock-free synchronization.) Avoiding synchronization as much as possible is a good principle - one which I use often, and I actually contend is the only way to write scalable code. But <i>someone</i> always need to <i>eventually</i> synchronize. Even if it&#x27;s not your code explicitly, somewhere, your code will have to rely on code someone else wrote that synchronizes. This article is aimed to those people.