reader-writer lock

A reader-writer lock is like a mutex, but keeps track of exclusive and shared access. It has three states:

• unlocked
• exclusive access from a single writer
• and shared access from multiple readers. ¹

There are a lot of subtle tradeoff between reader-writer lock implementations. Most implementations will block new readers when there is a writer waiting, to prevent writer starvation where many readers collectively keep the lock from ever unlocking and never allow writers to update the data ¹

Implementations

• Rust std::sync::RwLock<T>

Footnotes

Footnotes

1. Chapter 1, Rust Atomics and Locks by Mara Bos (O’Reilly). Copyright 2023 Mara Bos, 978-1-098-11944-7 ↩ ↩²