Thin Locks: Featherweight Synchronization for Java (1998) [pdf]

Nice paper.

IIRC sometime later a further important optimization, known as biased locking[1], was added to Java locks to avoid, in the always uncontended case, the expensive CAS required to acquire the lock.

[1] https://blogs.oracle.com/dave/biased-locking-in-hotspot

There was a sequel to this, from different researchers, also at IBM, proposing an improvement called a tasuki lock:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.92....

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