What is a race condition?

Question

When writing multithreaded applications, one of the most common problems experienced is race conditions.

My questions to the community are:

What is the rac

Answer 1

A sort-of-canonical definition is "when two threads access the same location in memory at the same time, and at least one of the accesses is a write." In the situation the "reader" thread may get the old value or the new value, depending on which thread "wins the race." This is not always a bug—in fact, some really hairy low-level algorithms do this on purpose—but it should generally be avoided. @Steve Gury give's a good example of when it might be a problem.