> the compiler reducing the optimization possibilities. Having native atomics in C/C++ helps with that too.

atomics are too low level for my use cases, but I have to confess that I still have to study (and maybe port my code to) the new C++ synchronization classes

do you know if there is an equivalent to my example (using critical sections for locks) in the new C++ standard, I see there is std::lock_guard but it's based on std::mutex, so seems to map to Windows mutexes which is way too slow