Atomic Counter

Definitions

1. A counter variable that can be incremented, decremented, or read safely across threads without race conditions by using atomic operations. Atomic counters are useful for metrics, coordination, and lightweight synchronization where a full mutex would be unnecessary overhead.

   In plain English: A thread-safe counter that can be updated without race conditions.

   Example: "They replaced the lock with an atomic counter because the hot path only needed a thread-safe in-flight request count."

Related Terms

• Race Condition
• Deadlock
• Lock
• Memory Model
• Memory Order
• Multi-Threading
• Notify
• Atomic Reference