Clojure Data Structures and Algorithms Cookbook

Simulating multithreading using time-sharing

Time-sharing is about sharing a computing facility between multiple concurrent processes. At its very basic version, a scheduler decides , which one of these competing processes to execute at every single quantum of time. This way, even a single processor core, only capable of sequential operation, is able to spawn multiple threads, as if they were being executed in parallel.

One method of preventing race conditions, that is, multiple processes concurrently reading and writing wrong versions of the same shared place in memory, is locking. Imagine, for example, that there are two processes incrementing the same shared counter. Process 1 takes the value of the counter and overwrites it with the value ...