Mutexes and locks
A mutex, short for mutual exclusion, is akin to a digital gatekeeper. It regulates access, ensuring that at any given moment, only a single thread can enter its protected domain, eliminating the chaos of concurrent access. Imagine a high-stakes auction room where only one person can place a bid at any instant, thereby preventing overlap and conflict. That’s the function of a mutex in the world of multi-threaded applications.
Within the C++ Standard Library, the header <mutex> bestows several types of mutexes upon us. The most commonly used among them is std::mutex. This basic mutex is a versatile tool suitable for many synchronization needs. A pair of operations—lock() and unlock()—provides a straightforward means to guard shared resources.
From manual to automatic – lock guards and unique locks
Manually locking and unlocking mutexes can be error-prone. There’s always the lurking danger of forgetting to unlock a mutex...
