Synchronization Patterns 1 1.1 Synchronization Patterns

Concurrent programming is often more challenging than sequential programming, however. Many of these challenges arise from the need to serialize access to shared resources. In particular, threads that run concurrently can access the same other objects or variables simultaneously and potentially corrupt these objects' and variables' internal state. Therefore, code that should not execute concurrently in objects or functions can be serialized by a critical section. A critical section is a sequence of instructions that obeys the following invariant: while one thread or process is executing in the critical section, no other thread or process can execute in the same critical section [Tan95].