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What is a race condition and how do you fix it (3 ways)?

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The essence

A race condition is when the program's result depends on the order in which threads reach shared data, and that order is not controlled. The special and most dangerous case is a data race: two threads access the same memory at the same time, at least one writes, and there is no synchronization. A data race is undefined behavior (corrupted structures, crashes). A race condition can exist without a data race: for example check-then-act ("checked the key is absent, inserted" — but someone inserted between the check and the insert).

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