[markdoubleyou]

I'm the Mark who's referenced there. When I did that original benchmark I discovered that the underlying mutex used by MSVCRT did change between versions. For example, in Visual C++ 2013, they used the Windows Concurrency Runtime, which was awful under heavy contention. Newer MSVCRT versions use SRWLOCK.

(And I wouldn't characterize myself as being overly impressed... for my particular scenario I wrote, "if you have a poorly written app that's bottlenecked on a lock, then consider targeting Windows to make the best of a bad situation." A better approach, of course, would be to just improve your code!)