Double-checked locks to support lockless collaboration

Double-checked locks are normally seen as a form of optimization, they reduce the overhead of their acquisition by first testing their locking criterion. I recently used double-checked locking to support non locking collaboration  between real-time processes. Here is how it works:  all processes agree upon a future collaboration point, each then sets up a lock to protect themselves from going past that point without the right information, they then proceed to exchange enough information in a finite number of transactions, this completes enough their knowledge that when they meet the collaboration point the lock is not activated. Well-tuned and repeated, the processes exchange information in a semi-synchronous manner without ever waiting on the locks!