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Cover image for Lock / Mutex to a software engineer (Difficulty 3)
Saurav Shah
Saurav Shah

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Lock / Mutex to a software engineer (Difficulty 3)

This is a submission for DEV Computer Science Challenge v24.06.12: One Byte Explainer.

Explainer

A mutex blocks access to a critical section until the current thread is done, preventing race conditions but potentially causing performance hits. The GIL in CPython restricts access to shared resources to one thread at a time, impacting multi-threading.

Additional Context

I am planning to post 5 submissions explaining "Lock/Mutex" at 5 levels of difficulty. This is Difficulty 3.

A Computer Science graduate or a software engineer might have heard and used mutex. Mutex explanation and some interesting facts is fun.

For more about explaining the term in 5 Levels of difficulty, refer to the below post. It's interesting!

Previous explanation for Difficulty 2
Next explanation for Difficulty 4

Cheers🎉 ~ sauravshah31

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