Introduction to Locked Data Structures

This lesson presents a motivation to study locked data structures.

Before moving beyond locks, you’ll first learn how to use locks in some common data structures. Adding locks to a data structure to make it usable by threads makes the structure thread safe. Of course, exactly how such locks are added determines both the correctness and performance of the data structure. And thus, our challenge:

CRUX: HOW TO ADD LOCKS TO DATA STRUCTURES

When given a particular data structure, how should one add locks to it, in order to make it work correctly? Further, how can locks be added such that the data structure yields high performance, enabling many threads to access the structure at once, i.e., concurrently?

Get hands-on with 1200+ tech skills courses.