Rust Essentials - Second Edition

Thread safety

Traditional programming with threads is very difficult to get right if you allow the different threads to work on the same mutable data, or so-called shared memory. When two or more threads simultaneously change data, then data corruption (also called data racing) can occur due to the unpredictability of the thread's scheduling.

In general, data (or a type) is said to be thread-safe when its contents will not be corrupted by the execution of different threads. Other languages offer no such help, but the Rust compiler simply forbids non-thread-safe situations to occur. The same ownership strategy that we looked at to allow Rust to prevent memory safety errors also enables you to write safe, concurrent programs.

Consider the following ...