This post ends the mini-series about the dining philosophers problem by Andre Adrian. Today, he applies powerful locks and semaphores.

In the last post "Dining Philosophers Problem I", Andre Adrian started his analysis of the classical dining philosophers' problem. Today, he uses atomics, mutexes, and locks.

At Christmas time, I had a few nice discussions with Andre Adrian. He solved the classical dining philosopher's problem in various ways using modern C++. I convinced him to write an article about this classic synchronization issue, and I'm happy to publish it in three consecutive posts.

One of the participants in my CppCon 2018 workshop asked me: "Can a std::thread be interrupted?". No, that was my answer, but this is not correct anymore. With C++20, we might get a std::jthread.

After the last post to executors, I can finally write about the unified futures. I write in the post about the long past of the futures and end my detour from the C++ core guidelines.

A few weeks ago, one of the authors of the proposal to the futures in C++ Felix Petriconi wrote me an E-Mail. He said my article about std::future Extensions is quite dated. Honestly, he is right. The future of the futures changed mainly because of the executors.

A common problem in concurrency is the so-called ABA problem. That means you read a value twice and each time it returns the same value A. Therefore you conclude that nothing changed in between. But you forgot the B.

Blocking, non-blocking, lock-free, and wait-free. Each of these terms describes a key characteristic of an algorithm when executed in a concurrent environment. So, reasoning about the runtime behavior of your program often means putting your algorithm in the right bucket. Therefore, this post is about buckets.

This post is about malicious race conditions and data races. Malicious race conditions are race conditions that cause the breaking of invariants, blocking issues of threads, or lifetime issues of variables.

Race conditions and data races are related but different concepts. Because they are related, they are often confused. In German, we even translate both expressions with the term kritischer Wettlauf. That is very bad. To reason about concurrency, your wording must be exact. Therefore, this post is about race conditions and data races.