Are lock-free concurrent algorithms practically wait-free?
Dan Alistarh, Keren Censor-Hillel, Nir Shavit · 2014
Lock-free concurrent algorithms guarantee that some concurrent operation will always make progress in a finite number of steps. Yet programmers prefer to treat concurrent code as if it were wait-free, guaranteeing that all operations always make progress. Unfortunately, designing wait-free algorithms is generally a very complex task, and the resulting algorithms are not always efficient. While obtaining efficient wait-free algorithms has been a long-time goal for the theory community, most non-blocking commercial code is only lock-free.