Lock-Free
A progress guarantee under which the system as a whole continues making progress even if individual threads are delayed.
Concurrency Context
Lock-free algorithms commonly use atomic primitives such as CAS together with retry loops to update shared state without a mutex. The system-wide guarantee is that some operation continues to complete even if an individual thread is delayed.
Progress Boundary
Lock-free is weaker than wait-free: one participant can repeatedly lose races and starve. The absence of a mutex also does not remove contention, cache-coherence traffic, or the cost of failed atomic operations.