Advanced Python Programming

The first readers-writers problem

As we mentioned, the problem asks us to come up with a scheduling algorithm, so that readers and writers can access the text file appropriately and efficiently, without mishandling/corrupting the data that is included. A naive solution to this problem is to impose a lock on the text file, so that it becomes a non-shareable resource; this means that only one thread (either a reader or a writer) can access (and potentially manipulate) the text file at any given time.

Yet, this approach simply equates to a sequential program: if the shared resource can be utilized by only one thread at a given time, none of the processing time between different threads can be overlapped, and effectively, the execution becomes ...