What are lock-free data structures in Rust and how are they implemented?

Lock-free structures use atomic operations like CAS (Compare-And-Swap) instead of mutexes.

Lock-free programming relies on atomic primitives (AtomicUsize, AtomicPtr) and CPU instructions like CAS. These structures avoid blocking threads, improving throughput and reducing contention. However, they are harder to implement correctly due to ABA problems and memory ordering issues.