Share Data Safely with Mutex and Locks

The term mutex refers to mutually exclusive access to shared resources. A mutex is commonly used to avoid data corruption and race conditions due to multiple threads of execution attempting to access the same data. A mutex will typically use locks to restrict access to one thread at a time.

The STL provides mutex and lock classes in the <mutex> header.

How to do it

In this recipe, we will use a simple Animal class to experiment with locking and unlocking a mutex:

• We start by creating a mutex object: