Dealing with Mutation

If you don’t write and read data concurrently, no data races can happen. The easiest way to achieve this is by immutable values. Additionally to this best practice, there are two typical strategies. First, protect the critical sections by a lock such as a scoped lock or strategized locking. In object-oriented design, the critical section is typically an object including its interface. The Thread-Safe Interface protects the entire object. Second, the modifying thread just signals when it is done with its work. This is the strategy of guarded suspension.

Scoped Locking

Scoped locking is the idea of RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization) applied to a mutex. The key idea of this idiom is to bind the resource acquisition and release to the lifetime of an object. As the name suggests it, the lifetime of the objects is scoped. Scoped means in particular that the C++ runtime is responsible for invoking the destructor of the object and, therefore, to release...