Threads And Concurrency Questions Medium
A race condition is a situation that occurs in concurrent programming when the behavior of a program depends on the relative timing or interleaving of multiple threads or processes. It arises when two or more threads access shared data or resources concurrently, and the final outcome of the program depends on the order in which the threads are scheduled to run by the operating system.
In a race condition, the result of the program may vary depending on the specific timing of thread execution, leading to unpredictable and incorrect behavior. This can result in data corruption, incorrect calculations, or other unexpected outcomes.
Race conditions typically occur when multiple threads or processes attempt to modify shared data simultaneously without proper synchronization mechanisms in place. For example, if two threads try to increment the same variable concurrently, the final value of the variable may not be what was expected due to the interleaving of the thread execution.
To prevent race conditions, synchronization techniques such as locks, semaphores, or atomic operations can be used to ensure that only one thread can access shared data at a time. By properly synchronizing access to shared resources, race conditions can be avoided, ensuring the correctness and consistency of the program's execution.