- Better volatile vriables
- same memory semantics as volatile
- support of atomic updates
- Compare and Swap - atomic read modify write instruction. supported by Atomic variable classes.
- CAS is an optimistic technique.
- With CAS under a contention scenario only one thread wins and updates the variable's value & the rest loose. Loosers are not punished by suspension, as they could be if they fail to acquire a lock.
- Looser threads are not blocked and they can decide whether they want to retry or do nothing.
