More Advanced Locks

Added in .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0, respectively, the ReaderWriterLockSlim and SpinLock primitives are often useful, too. Their use is fairly specialized, so we’ll limit ourselves to a basic discussion.

ReaderWriterLock(Slim)

The essential problem of various concurrency and synchronization problems boils down to simultaneous reader and writer accesses on a shared resource. Often, the presence of multiple readers is allowed, while writers should be protected from one another to prevent harm. Therefore, the classic monitor-based lock is often too coarse-grained because it can’t differentiate from reader and writer accesses.

ReaderWriterLock and ReaderWriterLockSlim accommodate for such scenarios. The latter was introduced in .NET ...

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