February 2019
Intermediate to advanced
672 pages
16h 50m
English
In a readers-writers problem, first and foremost, we have a shared resource, which, in most cases, is a text file. Different threads interact with that text file; each is either a reader or a writer. A reader is a thread that simply accesses the shared resource (the text file) and reads in the data included in that file, while a writer is a thread that accesses, and possibly mutates, the contents of the text file.
We know that writers and readers cannot access the shared resources simultaneously since if a thread is writing data to the file, no other thread should be accessing the file to read any data from it. The goal of the readers-writers problem is therefore to find a correct and efficient way to design and coordinate ...