1. A lock-free method of managing storage reclamation in a multi-threaded computation, the method comprising: maintaining respective reference counts for storage blocks of a data structure shared amongst threads of the multi-threaded computation; and accessing pointers to the storage blocks using pointer operations to coordinate modification of the respective reference counts, wherein as a condition precedent to dereferencing a particular pointer loaded from the shared data structure, at least one of the pointer operations ensures that (i) an indication is made that one of the threads intends to dereference the particular pointer and (ii) the indication is sufficient to prevent freeing of a particular storage block referenced by the particular pointer.