> Really, "lock free" programming is just locking critical sections with lower level hardware primitives

Can fence instructions really be seen as locking mechanism? While a lock generally is bound to some data, memory fences are bound to relationships between data or a piece of code. I don't know if Rust or any other language can help you with that.

Isn't the actual bad practice to expose locks at all? If the locking is done implicitly in API calls, one doesn't need to ask "What locks it".