Mastering Rust - Second Edition

Pitfalls

The advantages of concurrency abound, but it brings a whole lot of complexity and pitfalls that we have to deal with. Some issues when writing concurrent programs code are as follows:

• Race conditions: As threads are scheduled by the operating system, we don't have a say in what order and how threads will access a shared data. A common use case in multi-threaded code is about updating a global state from multiple threads. This follows a three step process—read, modify, and write. If these three operations aren't performed atomically by threads, we may end up with a race condition.

A set of operations is atomic if they execute together in an indivisble manner. For a set of operations to be atomic, it must not be pre-empted in the ...