Advanced Python Programming

An additional note about locks

While the approach of dismissing locking mechanisms in our program to eliminate deadlocks might raise some questions and concerns, it does effectively reveal a new point for us about lock objects in Python: it is possible for an element of a concurrent program to completely bypass the locks when accessing a given resource. In other words, lock objects only prevent different processes/threads from accessing and manipulating a shared resource if those processes or threads actually acquire the lock objects.

Locks, then, do not actually lock anything. They are simply flags that help to indicate whether a resource should be accessed at a given time; if a poorly instructed, or even malicious, process/thread attempts ...