Usage
CAS is used for implementing synchronization primitives like semaphores and mutexes, likewise more sophisticated lock-free and wait-free algorithms. Maurice Herlihy (1991) proved that CAS can implement more of these algorithms than atomic read, write, or fetch-and-add, and assuming a fairly large amount of memory, that it can implement all of them.
Algorithms built around CAS typically read some key memory location and remember the old value. Based on that old value, they compute some new value. Then they try to swap in the new value using CAS, where the comparison checks for the location still being equal to the old value. If CAS indicates that the attempt has failed, it has to be repeated from the beginning: the location is re-read, a new value is re-computed and the CAS is tried again.
Read more about this topic: Compare-and-swap
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