A race condition is a situation in computer science where multiple threads or processes access shared data at the same time, leading to unexpected and incorrect results. Avoiding race conditions is crucial for ensuring the correctness and reliability of multithreaded applications.
One common approach to avoiding race conditions is to use synchronization primitives such as locks or mutexes. Locks allow threads to acquire exclusive access to shared data, preventing other threads from modifying it until the lock is released. Mutexes are a specific type of lock that can be used to protect critical sections of code that should only be executed by one thread at a time.