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Thinking in C++ Vol 2 - Practical Programming
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Sharing limited resources

You can think of a single-threaded program as one lonely entity moving around through your problem space and doing one thing at a time. Because there s only one entity, you never have to think about the problem of two entities trying to use the same resource at the same time: problems such as two people trying to park in the same space, walk through a door at the same time, or even talk at the same time.

With multithreading things aren t lonely anymore, but you now have the possibility of two or more threads trying to use the same resource at once. This can cause two different kinds of problems. The first is that the necessary resources may not exist. In C++, the programmer has complete control over the lifetime of objects, and it s easy to create threads that try to use objects that get destroyed before those threads complete.

The second problem is that two or more threads may collide when they try to access the same resource at the same time. If you don t prevent such a collision, you ll have two threads trying to access the same bank account at the same time, print to the same printer, adjust the same valve, and so on.

This section introduces the problem of objects that vanish while tasks are still using them and the problem of tasks colliding over shared resources. You ll learn about the tools that are used to solve these problems.

Thinking in C++ Vol 2 - Practical Programming
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   Reproduced courtesy of Bruce Eckel, MindView, Inc. Design by Interspire