Share data safely with mutex and locks

The term mutex refers to mutually exclusive access to shared resources. A mutex is commonly used to avoid data corruption and race conditions, due to multiple threads of execution attempting to access the same data. A mutex will typically use locks to restrict access to one thread at a time.

The STL provides mutex and lock classes in the <mutex> header.

How to do it…

In this recipe, we will use a simple Animal class to experiment with locking and unlocking a mutex:

• We start by creating a mutex object:

  std::mutex animal_mutex;

The mutex is declared in the global scope, so it's accessible to all the relevant objects.

• Our Animal class has a name and a list of friends:

  class Animal {
      using friend_t = list<Animal>;
      string_view s_name{ "unk" };
      friend_t l_friends{};
  public:
      Animal() = delete...