Rust Programming By Example

Lock-free data structures

The only remaining type to explain is SegQueue, from the crossbeam crate. This type is a lock-free queue, meaning that it can be used concurrently by multiple threads without a lock. The implementation of lock-free data structures is beyond the scope of this book, but it suffices to say that it uses atomic operations behind the scenes so that we don't need to use a Mutex to mutate this value in mutable threads at the same time. We still need to wrap this queue in an Arc to be able to share it with multiple threads.

We're using a lock-free data structure because we'll be constantly checking whether there's a new element in this queue while possibly adding new elements to this queue from another thread. If we were ...