Advanced Python Programming

Locks as a solution to race conditions

In this section, we will discuss the most common solution to race conditions: locks. Intuitively, since the race conditions that we observed arose when multiple threads or processes accessed and wrote to a shared resource simultaneously, the key idea to solving race conditions is to isolate the executions of different threads/processes, especially when interacting with a shared resource. Specifically, we need to make sure that a thread/process can only access the shared resource after any other threads/processes interacting with the resource have finished their interactions with that resource.