C++17 STL Cookbook

Lock classes

Everything is nice and easy as long as threads do just lock a mutex, access some concurrence protected object and unlock the mutex again. As soon as a forgetful programmer misses to unlock a mutex somewhere after locking it, or an exception is thrown while a mutex is still locked, things look ugly pretty quick. In the best case, the program just hangs immediately and the missing unlock call is identified quickly. Such bugs, however, are very similar to memory leaks, which also occur when there are missing explicit delete calls.

When regarding memory management, we have unique_ptr, shared_ptr and weak_ptr. Those helpers provide very convenient ways to avoid memory leaks. Such helpers exist for mutexes, too. The simplest one is ...