Promises about futures

If you haven't encountered concurrent programming topics before, the last few sections probably got progressively more and more challenging. Mutexes are pretty simple to understand because they model a familiar idea from daily life: getting exclusive access to some resource by putting a lock on it. Read-write locks (shared_mutex) aren't much harder to understand. However, we then took a significant jump upward in esotericism with condition variables--which are hard to grasp partly because they seem to model not a noun (like "padlock") but a sort of prepositional verb phrase: "sleep until, but also, wake." Their opaque name doesn't help much either.

Now we continue our journey into concurrent programming with a topic ...

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