Simulating race conditions in Python

Before we discuss a solution that we can implement to solve the problem of race conditions, let's try to simulate the problem in Python. If you have already downloaded the code for this book from the GitHub page, go ahead and navigate to the Chapter14 folder. Let's take a look at the Chapter14/example1.py file—specifically, the update() function, as follows:

# Chapter14/example1.py

import random
import time

def update():
    global counter

    current_counter = counter # reading in shared resource
    time.sleep(random.randint(0, 1)) # simulating heavy calculations
    counter = current_counter + 1 # updating shared resource

The goal of the preceding update() function is to increment a global variable called counter, and it is to be called by a separate thread in our script. Inside the function, we are interacting with a shared resource...