Implementing Semaphore
Understand how to implement a semaphore in C# with Monitor for mutual exclusion and thread signaling. Learn to manage permits with acquire and release methods, handle thread blocking when permits are unavailable, and coordinate concurrent threads effectively. This lesson teaches foundational concurrency techniques useful for senior engineering interviews.
We'll cover the following...
Implementing Semaphore
C# does provide its own implementation of Semaphore, however, it is an interesting exercise to learn to implement a semaphore using a monitor.
Briefly, a semaphore is a construct that allows some threads to access a fixed set of resources in parallel. Always think of a semaphore as having a fixed number of permits to give out. Once all the permits are given out, requesting threads, need to wait for a permit to be returned before proceeding forward.
Your task is to implement a semaphore which takes in its constructor the maximum number of permits allowed and is also initialized with the same number of permits. Additionally, if all the permits have been given out, the semaphore blocks threads attempting to acquire it.
Solution
Given the above definition we can now start to think of what functions our Semaphore class will need to expose. We need a ...