alt Hacker NewsNot true, a wait-free algorithm guarantees that a read will complete in a bounded amount of time. And it guarantees that all threads make progress, it is lock-free that only guarantees progress for one thread.
If the value changes frequently, it will get outdated quickly, but that has nothing to do with the synchronization mechanism used. And even if writes happen rarely, there is always a chance that the value you read will be outdated a nanosecond later.
Only the read of data small enough to be read atomically will complete in a bounded amount of time (i.e. not larger than 16 bytes on the current x86 or Arm CPUs).
If you have a bigger shared data structure, in which some other thread writes continuously, there exists absolutely no way to stop it and no way for any other thread to progress.