The goal of the article isn't about sheer performance — there are plenty of notes about it. If it was about pure performance, it'd be recommending moving away f

The goal of the article isn't about sheer performance — there are plenty of notes about it. If it was about pure performance, it'd be recommending moving away from objc classes and methods and using C functions or C++ classes instead, like std::atomic<>. It's meant to be a somewhat-easy-to-digest introduction to lock-free design, where applicable. What @synchronized ends up doing is far more complex — it has to be, to ensure the correctness of its purposes: https://github.com/opensource-apple/objc4/blob/master/runtime/objc-sync.mm https://github.com/opensource-apple/objc4/blob/master/runtim...