Mutex vs Semaphore
The concept of and the differences between a mutex and a semaphore will befuddle most developers. In this lesson, we discuss the differences between the two most fundamental concurrency constructs offered by almost all language frameworks. Difference between a mutex and a semaphore makes a pet interview question for senior engineering positions!
Mutex vs Semaphore
Having laid the foundation of concurrent programming concepts and their associated issues, we'll now discuss the all-important mechanisms of locking and signaling in multi-threaded applications and the differences between these constructs.
Mutex
Mutex as the name hints implies mutual exclusion. A mutex is used to guard shared data such as a linked-list, an array, or any primitive type. A mutex allows only a single thread to access a resource or critical section.
Once a thread acquires a mutex, all other threads attempting to acquire the same mutex are blocked until the first thread releases the mutex. Once released, most implementations arbitrarily chose one of the waiting threads to acquire the mutex and make progress.
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