"The intent is that vendors will specialize a fully-general locking
implementation of a generic atomic template with implementations using
hardware primitives when those primitives are applicable."

Doesn't that explicitly prevent the operations to be implemented in a
lock-free way if hardware primitives don't exist for the size/alignment
of the type?

As far as I know, there are multiple lock-free algorithms to implement
CASN (multi-word compare and swap) with CAS.

Wouldn't it be worth consideration?

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