Why is lockless concurrency such a big deal (in Clojure)?

Question

I'm told that Clojure has lockless concurrency and that this is Important.

I've used a number of languages but didn't realize they were performing locks behind the scenes.

Why is this an advantage in Clojure (or in any language that has this feature)?

Answer 1

I can't speak about Clojure specifically, but ... it means you don't need to wait for someone to be done with something before you can get to work. Which is great.

Typically it's achieved with immutable types. If nothing can be modified, you don't really need to wait till someone else is done with it before you can access it.