For what tasks are atomic operations used in programming?

Atomic operations are used to ensure correct access and modification of shared data in multithreaded or concurrent environments without using locks (mutex). They guarantee that the operation is performed entirely and indivisibly, preventing race conditions.

Typical tasks:

• Incrementing or decrementing counters (e.g., visit counters).
• Updating flags or states that must change without interruption.
• Implementing lock-free data structures (e.g., queues or stacks).

In Go, the sync/atomic package is used for atomic operations.

Example:

import (
    "fmt"
    "sync/atomic"
)

func main() {
    var counter int64 = 0
    atomic.AddInt64(&counter, 1) // atomic increment by 1
    fmt.Println(counter) // 1
}